# Alfa Bank Russia's largest private bank, the flagship of the Alfa Group consortium built from 1988–89 by [[Mikhail Fridman]], German Khan and Alexey Kuzmichev, with Petr Aven as the bank's longtime president. It appears in the vault for two reasons that pull in opposite directions: the 2016 **Trump Tower server story**, which turned out to be unfounded and became a pillar of the right's "Russia hoax" narrative; and the owners' very real success at **escaping sanctions**, which culminated in the EU delisting Fridman in September 2026. ## The server story | Date | Event | |---|---| | Sept 19, 2016 | [[Perkins Coie]] lawyer [[Michael Sussmann]] brings the FBI data showing DNS lookups between an Alfa Bank server and a Trump Organization domain | | Oct 31, 2016 | Franklin Foer publishes the story in *Slate*; the *New York Times* reports the same day that the FBI saw innocent explanations such as marketing email | | Late 2016 | Researchers find the domain was run by Cendyn, a hotel-marketing firm, not the Trump Organization; Alfa's investigator Mandiant finds spam/marketing traffic | | Early 2017 | The FBI concludes there were "no such links" (per a footnote in the Justice Department inspector general's December 2019 report) | | Aug 2020 | The Senate Intelligence Committee "could not positively determine an intent or purpose" for the traffic. The [[Mueller Report]] does not mention it | | May 31, 2022 | [[John Durham]]'s prosecution of Sussmann for lying about his clients ends in acquittal | The claim itself didn't hold up; the prosecution of the man who brought it didn't either. That double failure is why the story is useful to both sides: the right cites it as proof the Clinton campaign manufactured Russia allegations, while the acquittal is the first courtroom loss of the Durham inquiry. See [[Fusion GPS]] and [[Grand Conspiracy Probe]]. ## Suing everyone The owners sued over the [[Steele Dossier]], which alleged ties between Alfa's owners and Putin. They lost against [[BuzzFeed]] in New York (2021) and against [[Christopher Steele]] in Washington under D.C.'s anti-SLAPP law (2018, upheld 2020), but won in London against Steele's firm, Orbis: in July 2020 a judge awarded **£18,000 each** to Aven and Fridman. In 2020 Alfa also filed "John Doe" suits claiming the DNS traffic was a sophisticated cyberattack meant to frame it. ## Sanctions — and escape | Date | Event | |---|---| | Feb 28 / Mar 15, 2022 | EU and UK freeze Fridman's and Aven's assets after the invasion of Ukraine | | Apr 6, 2022 | The U.S. fully blocks Alfa-Bank and subsidiaries — but **never personally sanctions Fridman or Aven** | | Apr 10, 2024 | The EU General Court annuls their 2022–23 listings for lack of evidence; later renewals keep them in place | | 2024–26 | Fridman files investment-treaty claims, including **$16 billion against Luxembourg** | | Sept 22, 2026 | The EU removes Fridman (with Alisher Usmanov) from its sanctions list, in a trade that renewed about 3,000 other listings for three years. Luxembourg — the target of his claim — pushed for it; Ukraine's foreign minister called the decision "shameful" | > [!note] Why this matters more than the server > The server story was a false lead. The durable story is a set of oligarchs who avoided U.S. personal sanctions entirely, and used arbitration claims to pry a delisting out of an EU that needs unanimity. See [[Russian Oligarchy]] and [[Sanctions Designation Pipeline]]. ## See Also - [[Mikhail Fridman]] · [[Russian Oligarchy]] - [[Michael Sussmann]] · [[Perkins Coie]] · [[John Durham]] - [[Steele Dossier]] · [[Christopher Steele]] · [[Fusion GPS]] - [[Office of Foreign Assets Control]] · [[Sanctions Designation Pipeline]]