The Atlantic Council has announced that it has ended its association with a major donor, Gaurav Srivastava, after the Indian-American businessman was found to be involved in various fraudulent activities.
The leading American think-tank stated that it decided to sever its relationship with Gaurav Srivastava, his wife Sharon, and their fake charitable organization, The Gaurav & Sharon Srivastava Family Foundation, after the think tank was unable to verify vital details of their background during its donor screening process. Srivastava and his wife Sharon donated a minimum of $1 million to the think tank for its Global Food Security Forum held in Bali in November 2022.
“All the funds that Mr. Srivastava provided to the Atlantic Council for the Global Food Security Forum were used solely for the event,” a spokesperson for the Atlantic Council clarified. “However, we did return funding from Mr. Srivastava in 2023 for future collaboration.”
“We decided to end our relationship with Mr. Srivastava after discovering new information through our donor review process. For instance, we found out that The Gaurav & Sharon Srivastava Family Foundation had not been registered as a 501(c)(3) [non-profit organization] in April 2023, despite Mr. Srivastava’s claim to the Council that this was a registered foundation,” the spokesperson added.
A major donor of the Atlantic Council, Gaurav Kumar Srivastava, has been accused of orchestrating large-scale scams, including using the name of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to defraud international businessmen. The think-tank hosted its 2022 Global Food Security Forum, sponsored by the Gaurav & Sharon Srivastava Foundation, an alleged non-profit NGO run by Srivastava with his wife Sharon Srivastava.
The Foundation paid a panel of experts to discuss global food security. However, after respected journalists Bradley Hope and Soobin Kim discovered that Srivastava pretended to be a CIA spy to fraudulently take over assets of a Dutch trader, the think-tank faced questions and mounting criticism. Srivastava assured the trader of help using his alleged “CIA” links and told him that he was a “non-official cover” or NOC for the CIA. He put forth a dubious proposition: if the trader moved 50% of the shares of his company to a Delaware-incorporated company controlled by Srivastava, he would be excused from future sanctions on Russia and given a special license to continue trading by the US Treasury’s desire to keep oil flowing.
Srivastava is an Indian businessman living in America, who is accused of defrauding international businessmen by claiming to be an undercover CIA operative. His lawyer claimed that the termination of Srivastava’s involvement with the Atlantic Council was “related to a gift in respect of a subsequent project, as to which the parties disagreed on the manner of its implementation after that $500,000 given in advance was returned.”
The Gaurav & Sharon Srivastava Family Foundation was registered in Delaware on 12 October 2022. Although the foundation is said to have been established in 2015, doubts have been raised about its establishment date and credibility. The Foundation is not registered as a charitable organization or private foundation with the US federal tax authority, the IRS. It also does not comply with the regulation to file Form 990.
After Project Brazen exposed Mr. Srivastava and his foundation, he lodged false claims with Google and Tumblr to remove the main article exposing his deceit. He used Tumblr’s backdating function to create posts that appeared to be from an earlier date and then used these posts as the basis for a copyright claim to manipulate Google results for his name and remove the Project Brazen fraud exposé of Srivastava.
Tumblr said that the blogs and their posts were removed “for violating community guidelines” after they were used in an attempt to remove factual stories about the businessman. The complex, international fraud by Srivastava is the subject of increasing media interest after other allegations about Srivastava’s history of fraud came to light.
