Alex van der Zwaan

Alex Rolf van der Zwaan (; born September 1984) is a Belgian-born Dutch attorney formerly with the London branch of New York–based international law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

On 20 February 2018, he pleaded guilty to one count of making a false statement to investigators while answering questions about Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. He served 30 days in prison and was fined $20,000. After serving his sentence, Van der Zwaan was deported to the Netherlands. He was later pardoned in December 2020 by U.S. President Donald Trump.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Justice was his firm's client and central to the indictment. In 2017, Skadden Arps refunded $567,000 billed by the firm to the Government of Ukraine.

Education and career Van der Zwaan, a Dutch citizen, He repeatedly assisted Ukrainian oligarch Gennadiy Bogolyubov, whose assets were at risk of being frozen by the London High Court on several occasions.

In November 2017, Van der Zwaan was fired from Skadden Arps for gross misconduct due to the false statements he made to the United States Special Counsel's Office. who worked on Skadden Arps's 2012 report, commissioned by the government of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych via Paul Manafort, that defended the prosecution, conviction and imprisonment of Yanukovych's rival, the country's former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko. He also served as rule-of-law consultant to the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine.

In February 2018, Special Counsel investigation prosecutor Andrew Weissmann stated that, as part of Manafort's and Rick Gates's lobbying effort to improve Yanukovych's reputation in the United States, Van der Zwaan took an advance copy of the report in late July or early August 2012 without authorization, and gave it to a public-relations firm working for the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice—with one aim being to get the report published in The New York Times—and in September 2012 gave Gates talking points about the report.

In a 3 November 2017 interview with Special Counsel prosecutors and FBI agents, Van der Zwaan maintained that his last communication with Gates was an innocuous text in mid-August 2016 and that his last contact with Kilimnik was a 2014 discussion of the latter's family; prosecutors determined instead that he had discussed the 2012 Skadden Arps report with Gates and Kilimnik in September 2016 during phone calls that he surreptitiously recorded.

On 20 February 2018, Van der Zwaan pleaded guilty to one count of making a false statement to investigators.

At his sentencing hearing on 3 April 2018, he was sentenced to 30 days in prison followed by two months of supervised release, and fined $20,000.

He was disbarred by the United Kingdom's Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal on 11 July 2019.

In December 2020, U.S. President Donald Trump pardoned Van der Zwaan in an eleventh-hour pardon prior to the end of Trump's four-year presidential term. The pardon rescinds his U.S. criminal record, allowing him to legally return to the United States.

Personal life , Van der Zwaan lives in London. In June 2017, he married Eva Khan, daughter of the Russian billionaire German Khan, co-founder and co-owner of Alfa Group. German Khan is suing BuzzFeed and the private investigation firm Fusion GPS over BuzzFeed's publication of the Steele dossier containing information about Trump's ties to Russia. Van der Zwaan has Russian roots In addition to Dutch, he speaks fluent English, Russian, and French.