Igor Fruman (1966-) was a Belarusian-American real estate businessman and associate of Rudy Giuliani, who, alongside Lev Parnas, played a central role in the 2019 Trump-Ukraine scandal.
Biography[]
Igor Fruman was born in Kalinkovichi, Belorussian SSR, Soviet Union in 1966, and he immigrated to the United States before working in the United States for a time. He lived in the Detroit metropolitan area before moving to south Florida, and he owned an import-export business in Ukraine as well as a beach bar, "Mafia Rave", in Odessa. He came to be an associate of Rudy Giuliani, attending George H.W. Bush's funeral with him in December 2018. Also in late 2018, Giuliani sent Fruman and Lev Parnas to find damaging information on Trump's rivals. The two of them played key roles in the firing of Marie Yovanovitch as the US ambassador to Ukraine, as she was seen as insufficiently pro-Trump. On 9 October 2019, Parnas and Fruman were arrested at Dulles International Airport before they could leave on a one-way trip to Hungary, and they were charged with seeking damaging information on Trump's rivals and for engineering Yovanovitch's firing.