(Bloomberg) -- Emin Agalarov, the Moscow pop star who arranged the now-infamous Trump Tower meeting in New York at the height of the 2016 election campaign, abruptly canceled his U.S. tour, citing the risk of being detained.
Agalarov said he’s ready to answer any question as part of U.S. probes into alleged Russian election meddling but he couldn’t get assurances regarding freedom and safety before his now-abandoned swing through the U.S. He’d been due to perform in New York on Jan. 26, followed by shows in Toronto, Miami and Los Angeles.
“My lawyer is in touch with U.S. authorities,” the American-educated singer said in an interview in his office overlooking his family’s sprawling convention center on the outskirts of Moscow where his father once planned to build a Trump Tower. “I have the feeling that the U.S. side doesn’t have good intentions -- that they have a desire, given this anti-Russian hysteria, to turn me, a well-known person, into a circus show.”
Agalarov, 39, is the son of billionaire developer Aras Agalarov, Donald Trump’s most prominent business associate in Russia. The elder Agalarov hosted the future U.S. president’s Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013, during which Trump played himself in one of Emin’s music videos. The two families spent years discussing plans to build a Trump Tower in the Russian capital that never materialized.
The Agalarovs in December asked a U.S. judge to throw out civil claims by the Democratic National Committee, which accused them of colluding with Russia and Trump’s campaign to interfere in the 2016 election. They said in a court filing that the racketeering suit failed to link them to the alleged conspiracy at the center of the case -- the hack of the DNC’s computer systems and subsequent release of emails by Wikileaks.
“I am completely open and willing to cooperate, but I am not sure the other side is willing to give me that opportunity,” Emin Agalarov said Monday.
Peter Carr, a spokesman for Special Counsel Robert Mueller, declined to comment.
To contact the reporters on this story: Stepan Kravchenko in Moscow at skravchenko@bloomberg.net;Henry Meyer in Moscow at hmeyer4@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Paul Sillitoe at psillitoe@bloomberg.net, Brad Cook
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