US lawyer says UK intel firm paid for hack operation against him
BALTIMORE, Maryland, April 15 (Reuters) - A New York attorney has accused a British private intelligence firm of paying mercenary hackers who he says tipped a court battle in his opponents' favor.
In a legal motion filed Thursday, opens new tab in Manhattan federal court, Daniel Feldman accused the London-based investigations firm Vantage Intelligence of paying the spies who intercepted privileged communications with his attorneys around 2016, 2017, and 2018. Feldman said the hacking occurred when he was in a court battle with Vantage's clients, a group of companies tied to the defunct Russian oil giant Yukos, over allegations of self-dealing, opens new tab.
Feldman denied wrongdoing, but in 2019 he was found liable for breaching his fiduciary duties, opens new tab to several of the Yukos-related entities, although the jury found no evidence of harm and fined him a nominal $5. Feldman, whose law license was suspended for a year in the wake of the verdict, is now seeking to have the judgment thrown out, arguing the case was irrevocably tainted by hacking.
Attempts to contact the Yukos-related entities, which are based out of the British Virgin Islands and the Netherlands, were unsuccessful. U.S. attorneys listed for the firms did not return repeated messages seeking comment.
Vantage referred questions to a lawyer who did not return messages seeking comment. Vantage last year drew attention, opens new tab in the private intelligence world when it brought in Erik Prince, the founder of the private military company Blackwater and an ally of President Donald Trump, to serve on its board of advisors. Prince is not named in Feldman's motion and there's no suggestion that he had any involvement with the hacking. Messages left with Prince and his lawyer weren't returned.
Feldman's motion follows a pair of Reuters investigations in 2022 and 2023 outlining how the litigants around the world were being hacked by their opponents in high profile cases using mercenary spies based out of India.
Feldman was one of thousands of cyberespionage targets identified by Reuters during its reporting. In Feldman's filing, he said that federal prosecutors in Manhattan privately confirmed that his emails had been breached ahead of the 2023 sentencing of Israeli private eye Aviram Azari, a key figure in the hack-for-hire industry.
The Justice Department declined comment. Azari, who has since served out his sentence and returned to Israel, did not return an email. A former business associate told Reuters that Azari "refuses to discuss anything related to his previous conviction."
In his lawsuit, Feldman said he had been targeted by Indian hackers hired by Azari, and that prosecutors provided him with numerous invoices showing Vantage was being billed by Azari for the hacking at the time. Azari billed Vantage 357,000 euros ($404,800) in total, Feldman said, adding that the spying tipped the scales of justice.
"Email was my primary means of communication with my attorneys," Feldman said in the motion. "It belies common sense that it did not create an unfair advantage for the plaintiffs."
Feldman joins a small but growing list of litigants who have used evidence of hacking to challenge legal judgments following Reuters' reporting.
Last month, Israeli investor Ofir Levin said in legal documents filed in Florida federal court, opens new tab that his former business partner, Edmund Shamsi, had deployed Indian hackers against him in the context of an Israeli arbitration battle he lost. Shamsi's U.S. lawyer said in an email that the allegations were "ridiculous and completely untrue."
Last year, Missouri-based aviation executive Farhad Azima had his British fraud judgment thrown out after showing that his legal opponent had covered up its use of Indian hackers to steal his emails. He also settled parallel lawsuits in London and New York against his opponent's law firm, Philadelphia-based Dechert. There was no admission of wrongdoing.
($1 = 0.8819 euros)
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Western Telegraph
10 minutes ago
- Western Telegraph
Buy now pay later provider Zilch to launch first physical card
The fintech, which has been named one of the fastest-growing in the UK, said it means more of its customers can make payments in stores. Zilch currently offers a virtual card, stored in its app or in people's mobile wallets, which links to customers' debit cards and means they can pay for shopping flexibly. Buy now, pay later providers like Klarna and Clearpay have come under new standards since legislation was introduced last month (Tim Goode/PA) People can choose to pay in full, or spread payments over six weeks or three months, at retailers from Primark and Asos to Just Eat and eBay. While the virtual card can be used in shops as well as online, Zilch said that nearly 80% of UK adults do not regularly use mobile wallets so having a physical card will drive more transactions. It is also set to open up buy-now-pay-later options for bigger purchases like home repairs, hotel check-ins, and car rentals. The cards will become available to its existing customers from September. The London-based company has grown its customer base to more than five million since launching five year ago and securing authorisation from the UK's Financial Conduct Authority. It reached a valuation of two billion dollars (£1.5 billion) in 2021 and was named one of the UK's fastest-growing fintech unicorns this year. Buy now, pay later providers like Klarna and Clearpay have come under new standards since legislation was introduced last month. It came amid concerns that a lack of regulation has led some of the 10 million people who use it to take on too much debt.
Western Telegraph
10 minutes ago
- Western Telegraph
Madeleine McCann: fresh police searches to start on Tuesday in Portugal
Madeleine, then aged three, disappeared in 2007 while on holiday with her family in the resort of Praia da Luz after her parents went out to dinner and left her sleeping in a room with her toddler twin siblings. According to The Sun, the new searches will involve radar equipment that can scan beneath the ground and will focus on trenches near where the McCann family was staying at the resort. A spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Police said: 'We are aware of the searches being carried by the BKA (German federal police) in Portugal as part of their investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. 'The Metropolitan Police Service is not present at the search, we will support our international colleagues where necessary.' Around 30 German police officers, including forensic experts, will be starting the search on Tuesday, with Portuguese police also on the ground, according to reports. On Monday, Portuguese police reportedly closed off dirt roads in the area where searches will be taking place while tents have been set up in the nearby Atalaia area, near a cottage once lived in by Christian Brueckner, who German prosecutors say is the prime suspect in Madeleine's disappearance. Brueckner, who is currently serving a seven-year prison sentence in Germany for the rape of an elderly woman at her home in Praia da Luz in 2005, has denied any involvement. German authorities said they are receiving support from Portuguese law enforcement while the Portuguese police said that searches will be carried out between June 2 and 6 in the municipality of Lagos, in accordance with a European investigation order. Any evidence seized by the Policia Judiciaria will be passed to the German federal police. They last carried out searches in the country in 2023 near the Barragem do Arade reservoir, about 30 miles from Praia da Luz. Personnel at Barragem do Arade reservoir, in the Algave, Portugal, in May 2023 (Yui Mok/PA) Brueckner, who spent time in the area between 2000 and 2017, had photographs and videos of himself near the reservoir. It had previously been searched in 2008, when Portuguese lawyer Marcos Aragao Correia paid for specialist divers to search it after he claimed to have been tipped off by criminal contacts that Madeleine's body was there. British police were later given permission to examine scrubland near where she vanished in 2014. Last month, Madeleine's family marked the 18th anniversary of her disappearance, describing her as 'beautiful and unique' before her 22nd birthday, and expressing their determination to keep searching. A statement from her parents Kate and Gerry McCann and the family said: 'The years appear to be passing even more quickly and whilst we have no significant news to share, our determination to 'leave no stone unturned' is unwavering. We will do our utmost to achieve this.' In April, ministers approved more than £100,000 in additional funding for Scotland Yard detectives investigating Madeleine's disappearance.
New European
14 minutes ago
- New European
Britain enters a new nuclear age
Alongside an ambitious plan to build up to 12 new attack submarines, and to create jobs in six new ammunition factories, one of the most striking commitments is to enter discussions with the USA aimed at 'enhanced participation in Nato's nuclear mission'. This innocuous sounding sentence represents a big change in nuclear posture. Make no mistake: today's Strategic Defence Review marks the start of British rearmament. Not only does it signal the UK's commitment to increase defence spending to 3% of GDP, but to a type of spending designed to enhance the UK's strategic clout in the world. At present, only Belgium, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands host US-owned tactical nuclear bombs, with their aircraft designed to be 'dual capable' of delivering such bombs on target. The UK, which lacks tactical nuclear weapons, could now volunteer to do likewise, but would need to buy a different variant of the F-35 combat aircraft than the one that is flown from the Royal Navy's carriers. That would be a major change in nuclear policy – because the British deterrent has, since the 1990s, been strategic-only. As I've argued here before, we need a wider range of options because Putin is now making regular threats to use nukes against Nato, and tactical nukes against Ukraine – so it makes sense to place more of Nato's collective nuclear armoury closer to the front line, and distributed among a larger number of allies. Over and above deterring Russian aggression, almost everything Labour has announced today looks designed to achieve three things: to boost Britain's influence among its allies, to deliver high skilled jobs to places where they are scarce, and to get ahead of the game in the military technologies of the future. These don't only include drones – though the spectacular Ukrainian strike on Russia's strategic bomber fleet on Sunday shows that we've hardly even begun to understand their power. The technological arms race is now focused on niche areas of science – like nanotech, materials and quantum computing – and Labour, to its credit, has understood that it in any conflict with Russia it is the science labs of Oxbridge, Imperial and Edinburgh, not the 'playing fields of Eton', that might be decisive. Suggested Reading We must take a nuclear leap into the unknown Paul Mason For the armed forces, often bound by tradition and prone to inter-service rivalry, making the SDR work will be a challenge. Because in every domain of warfare – land, air, sea, space and cyberspace – they face the same problem: they are running decades-old kit designed for an era when Britain could choose which wars it fights, while at the same time moving to a completely new, digitally enabled way of fighting, in which technological change never stops. In this context, faced with a Russia that has turned itself into a war economy, and itself learned to innovate rapidly – deterrence comes down to showing Putin that our own industry, science and digital technology base could crank itself up to speed, and indeed surpass what Russia itself could achieve. For me, the most basic task of the SDR was to assess the scale of the Russian threat and offer the electorate an honest proposal of how to meet it – within our means. Though it might sound simple to achieve, it was not achieved at any point during 14 years of Conservative government, above all after 2020, when Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings declared a 'tilt' of security priorities towards Asia, while systematically underfunding the ministry of defence. Labour reversed that stance, declaring from day one that its priority is: 'Nato First'. The SDR places maritime warfare as the highest priority and designates the Atlantic and the Arctic as the UK's prime areas of interest. There's been a row today over the precise form of words Keir Starmer is using – describing the 3% target in the 2030s as an ambition. I think it's clear that Labour means to find the money to achieve that – but it stands way outside the term of UK fiscal forecasting, and no chancellor would allow it to be stated as a firm commitment outside of a budget statement. The real question with the SDR is: do the capabilities match the threats? The answer is: only if you believe Russia can be deterred through Nato remaining cohesive and the UK leading an enhancement of continent-wide nuclear deterrence. If it cannot, then 3, 4 or even 5% won't be enough. In 1939, after seven years of rearmament, Britain's defence budget was 9% of GDP – and once war broke out it rose above 50%. Today's focus on the big stuff – submarines, which are the capital ships of the 21st century, and a £15bn upgrade to nuclear warheads – reflects Starmer's determination for this country to avoid any impression that it wants to be 'Little Britain'. With a cash-strapped treasury, it is a decision to spend on what's strategic, and rely on allies for that which is not. There is even the promise, thinking long term, to specify within this parliament a replacement for the Dreadnought submarines, currently being built at Barrow: and they don't even go out of service until 2050. I would like to have seen more spending and faster – above all because defence industrial investment is one of the surest ways to boost growth and social cohesion in communities that have seen too little of it. But until Labour can win the argument with the British people that they need to pay more tax, and tolerate more borrowing to fund defence, progress is going to be incremental. That, in turn, will depend on the outcome of Ukraine's peace negotiations with Russia. If they fail – and that looks likely – people may wake up to the fact that the prospect of endless war on our doorstep requires a change of attitude to defence. In that sense, the SDR was the start, not the end, of something.
