Agent reports meeting after News reveal
The consultant who failed to report a City Hall meeting he attended last year with top officials in Mayor Adams’ administration and Azerbaijan’s deputy foreign minister — as required under federal law — “immediately filed an amendment” with the feds, according to a statement issued by the firm’s attorney.
Ezra Friedlander met with Azerbaijan’s deputy foreign minister Elnur Mammadov, Adams’ international affairs commissioner, Edward Mermelstein (photo), and mayoral staffer Rana Abbasova last May — a get-together that Friedlander touted at the time on the X social media platform.
But Friedlander and his consulting firm didn’t initially report the meeting, which is required under a federal law known as the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
A day after the Daily News reported that omission, Stuart Weichsel, a lawyer for Friedlander’s firm, attributed it to “an administrative oversight” in a statement first reported by The Forward and said the firm “immediately” filed an amendment. The documents Weichsel alluded to were not immediately available on FARA’s public database on Wednesday.
The unreported City Hall meeting occurred just months before federal investigators raided the home of Abbasova, Adams’ fundraiser Brianna Suggs and Cenk Öcal, a Turkish Airlines executive, as part of a probe into the mayor’s ties with Turkey. At the time of the meeting, Friedlander’s firm had contracts with both Azerbaijan and Turkey.
According to Friedlander, he, Mammadov and the city officials discussed the restoration of direct flights between New York and Azerbaijan. He added on Wednesday that Turkish Airlines didn’t come up in their conversation at the meeting, but that “it could be we spoke about Azerbaijan Airlines, AZAL airline.”
When asked whether Turkish Airlines was discussed in the meeting, Mayor Adams said Tuesday that “I don’t know what would happen in the meeting.”
Friedlander told The News that the video he posted of the meeting’s participants immediately before it took place demonstrates he wasn’t willfully trying to conceal anything.