Who Is Imaad Zuberi? Investor Donated $900,000 To Trump Inauguration, Under Investigation

Federal prosecutors from New York, on Monday, sought information and documents regarding President Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony in 2017. The subpoena was issued by the U.S. attorney’s office which required the inauguration committee to hand in the documents related to the ceremony held Jan. 20, 2017.

The subpoena particularly looks at the communication between the committee and Imaad Zuberi, a venture capitalist from Los Angeles, along with the firm he is associated with, Avenue Ventures, which donated 900,000 to it.

Investigators sought more information on the donors, foreign contributions, vendors, contractors and bank accounts related to the ceremony since by law it is only the citizens and legal residents who are allowed to donate to inauguration ceremonies.

The records requested were of the donations “made by or on behalf of foreign nationals,” however, Zuberi is an American citizen and the subpoena doesn’t state the nature of the prosecutors’ interests in Zuberi or his company. In a statement to the media, Zuberi’s spokesman, Steve Rabinowitz said the money he donated was “all his personal money, certainly not foreign money. Zuberi has no business with the US government and there is nothing that the US government can be particularly helpful to him with.”

Zuberi is a venture capitalist, private equity fund manager and an elite political fundraiser. He was one of the top fundraisers during former President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. In 2015, he was listed as a “Hillblazer” (people who raised more than $100,000 for Hillary Clinton’s two presidential campaigns).

He received several perks for his donations to both the campaigns including access to them. His Facebook page had several pictures of him with not just Hillary Clinton and Obama but also with former Vice President Joe Biden at a formal luncheon.

However, in 2017, after Trump’s election, he changed his political stance and told his friends that he needed to act quickly in order to balance out his political connections to maintain access and thus donated more than $1.1 million to committees associated with Trump and the Republican Party in three months following the election in 2016. Additionally, in the first two years of Trump administration, Zuberi was said to have donated more than $467,000 to the president’s reelection committee and the Republican National Committee.

Zuberi is a partner and the vice president at Avenue Ventures. He is vice president of strategic development for Manhattan Street Capital and runs their FundAthena division — which helps companies led by women or with a gender diverse management by providing them with easier access to funds and donations. He is also on the board of Latino Victory — a committee that works to grow Latino political power by increasing Latino representation at every level of the government.

Trump’s inaugural committee raised $107 million to fund events and parties surrounding his assumption of office in January 2017, which was more than twice the amount that was raised to fund Obama’s 2009 inaugural. The contributions were made by a wide array of corporate interests and rich Trump supporters.

Zuberi has previously donated to the University of California, Los Angeles and the donation was used to establish the UCLA Initiative on security and religious freedom. He also invested in the Al Areen Palace and Spa resort in Bahrain. He was born in Albany, New York, and studied finance and business economics as an undergraduate at the University of Southern California. He invested in insurance firms in Asia and the Middle East before getting an MBA from Stanford University in 2006.