Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent behind the thoroughly debunked Trump dossier, received over $1.2 million dollars for his work.
The former British spy earned £868,000 (nearly $1.2 million) in dividend payouts from his company Orbis Business International over two years with his business partner Christopher Burrows.
Sputniknews.com reports: They each own 50 percent of the company, which means they received £434,000 ($590,000) each.
In addition, Steele and Burrows also run another company Orbis Intelligence Limited, which more than doubled its profits last year and paid dividends to Orbis Business International, which in turn paid the money to the owners, according to the Daily Mail.
The Trump-Russia dossier was first published by BuzzFeed a few days before his inauguration in January, 2017.
The document was written by Steele, who was hired by the research firm Fusion GPS, which later turned out to have received funding from the Hillary Clinton campaign. In October, The Washington Post reported the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had helped fund Fusion GPS’ research on Trump’s alleged ties with Russia.
Fusion GPS was originally hired to do research during the 2016 Republican primary campaign for a still unknown Republican donor who wanted to defeat Trump.
In particular, the document alleged that the Russian government had compromising information on Trump, which has been denied by the US president and called a forgery by Moscow.
In December, Trump called the dossier “bogus” and a “Crooked Hillary pile of garbage” which his opponents tried to use to derail his campaign.
At the moment, two separate probes — dubbed a “witch hunt” by the US president — are being conducted by the US Senate and Special Counsel Robert Mueller into the Trump campaign’s alleged “collusion” with Moscow, a claim that has been called “groundless” by the Kremlin.
Sean Adl-Tabatabai