US lawyer says UK intel firm paid for hack operation against him

By Raphael Satter

BALTIMORE, Maryland (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 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.

    Feldman denied wrongdoing, but in 2019 he was found liable for breaching his fiduciary duties 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 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 Ofer Levin said in legal documents filed in Florida federal court 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.

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(Reporting by Raphael Satter; Editing Lincoln Feast.)