In order to win the upcoming elections and get to the Saeima Nil Ushakov decided to resort to the help of highly professional foreign specialists and hired American Christian Ferry as political consultant. Christian Ferry also admitted in a conversation with journalists that he signed a contract with the party Harmony to provide consultations, help in making strategic decisions, develop strategies and research public opinion.
Among the most prominent employers of the consultant were candidates for the presidency of the United States, John McCain and Lindsey Graham. Also in 2006 he advised the Prime Minister of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych, who later became president of Ukraine, before his flight to Russia. At that time, Christian Ferry was an employee of the American company Davis-Manafort led by Paul Manafort (adviser to the election campaign company for Donald Trump) and Rick Davis (head of the McCain election campaign). Mayor of Riga Nil Ushakov met with Christian Ferry during his visit to Washington. Ferry said that he met with the mayor of Riga in Washington, where they were introduced by a mutual friend David Merkel. “David knew about my successful work in Latin America and the impression of Mayor Ushakov about my former employers McCain and Graham,” the consultant explained. Merkel is a former US government official who dealt with international relations in Europe and Eurasia. Now he is an expert of the Washington Research Center Atlantic Council and the head of the organization Summit International Advisors.
A year ago, Merkel already tried to organize a meeting between the Mayor of Riga Ushakov and the Mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, who had previously been an advisor to former US President Barack Obama, but then Merkel failed to do so. In an invitation to dinner, he described Ushakov as the central figure in Latvian politics, who supported the presence of NATO in Latvia and believed that Crimea needed to be returned to Ukraine. He also said that Ushakov had broken all ties with the party United Russia to strengthen relations with European social-democratic parties in Germany and Sweden. In April and December of 2017 Ushakov met with both politicians during his visits to Washington. Re:Baltic notes that these meetings took place without coordination with the Latvian embassy in Washington or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as it had to be during official visits. The Mayor of Riga refused to comment, and it remained unclear how much the party would pay in the form of a fee and where they planned to take money for that. This is quite an important question, since, according to information taken from the database of foreign US lobbyists, the company Trailblazer Group owned by Ferry received $ 160,000 from September 2016 to August 2017. Then they had a task to organize a meeting between the President of Panama and McCain, which took place in June 2017. Ferry himself received from the Panamanian government two large fees-the first 21,000 and a month later – 37,500 dollars. It is also worth recalling that according to information received from the Bureau for the Prevention and Combating of Corruption, by now the party Harmony received donations of less than 100,000 euros.
