DONALD IS JUST ANOTHER KREMLIN PROJECT:

Long before Trump brought the Miss Universe contest to Moscow in 2013, Agalarov was adept at charming foreign clients. 

Gijrath came to Moscow in 2005 to pitch a Millionaire Fair, which Agalarov hosted at his then brand-new Crocus City complex, a luxury shopping center playground for Moscow's rich and famous.

Gijrath gave an example of Agalarov's hospitality: the fair was ground zero for Russia's flourishing culture of conspicuous consumption, with diamond-encrusted cellphones, yachts, Turkmen stallions and entire islands for sale.

But even for a blowout dedicated to luxury, Gijrath found he had booked too much space. Over vodka shots at a posh Italian restaurant, Agalarov forgave him a more than $1 million obligation from the contract and offered to kick in on electricity costs.

The fair went forward, at an expo center Agalarov had built at Crocus City. In 2009, he opened a concert hall and the country's only privately owned metro station nearby. 

The huge complex is located just outside Moscow's city limits, close to the offices of the Moscow regional government, where Agalarov forged a close alliance with Boris Gromov, the powerful regional governor until 2012.

"The mere possibility of a huge construction project in the Moscow region; construction of a private metro station -- no one else has a private metro station -- this all shows the level of his connections," said Ilya Shumanov, the deputy director of Transparency International's Russian office.

Now the region, which encompasses the towns and cities surrounding Moscow proper, is the seat of power of Gov. Andrei Vorobyov, who previously served as an aide to Sergei Shoigu, his predecessor as governor and currently Russia's defense minister. Along with Yuri Chaika, Russia's prosecutor general since 2006, the officials are seen as an important interest group within Russian politics, Shumanov said.

They regularly cross paths with Agalarov. Vorobyov cut the ribbon at the opening of Agalarov's Vegas concert hall in the city of Krasnogorsk last year, and Agalarov wrote a sharply worded defense of Chaika in the newspaper Kommersant after a 2015 corruption allegation by the opposition leader Alexei Navalny. 

"A lie told a thousand times becomes truth," Agalarov wrote acidly, noting that he was quoting Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. "I don't want to draw any parallels. But let's think about that."

Despite having strong regional connections, Agalarov was still seen as a minor player in the Kremlin compared with the heavyweights who dominate Putin's inner circle. "We're talking about someone several steps lower than them," Shumanov said.

A breakthrough came in 2009, when the Kremlin had a particularly thorny problem to solve: construction of a sprawling, 70-building university campus on the all-but-abandoned Russky Island on Russia's Pacific Coast, where Putin was to hold a summit for 21 countries at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting. 

Igor Shuvalov, then first deputy to Putin as prime minister, summoned Agalarov to discuss the project.

"It wasn't like I said no and then they forced me to do it, but it was a very difficult decision," Agalarov said in a 2013 radio interview on Ekho Moskvy. "If I take this project on and don't deliver, I would have let down first of all myself, but also the country, the president, the prime minister, and so forth."

The Kremlin expects the country's wealthiest business executives to take on, when asked, large-scale infrastructure projects, sometimes at a loss, to supplement the budget and promote Russia's national interests. The fortunes of Russia's rich can rise and fall precipitously based on the outcome of these prestige projects. 

Agalarov's work in the Far East earned him an Order of Honor at a Kremlin ceremony, bestowed by Putin himself in 2012. That year, Shuvalov and Vladi­mir Kozhin, a senior Kremlin official, attended a 10th anniversary party held at Crocus City. 

Soon there were more requests. In 2014, Agalarov signed on to save two troubled football stadiums, in Kaliningrad and the southern Russian city of Rostov, for the 2018 World Cup, as well as a 30-mile stretch of a new Moscow beltway.

"At the very top level, these kinds of relationships can be give and take," said a Moscow investment manager involved in the real estate market who asked not to be identified to protect his professional relationships. "But even with the added risk and possible losses, you can make up for it in influence and connections."

One example of the give was a "strategic cooperation agreement" announced in 2013 with the state-run Sberbank to finance a $3 billion Crocus Group development, possibly including a Trump Tower.

Agalarov also sought to bring Trump and Putin together. In last year's interview, Agalarov told The Post that he secured a preliminary agreement to organize a Kremlin meeting with Trump when he visited in 2013. When Putin canceled at the last minute, Agalarov took his case to the head of the Kremlin protocol department.

"You know what? I'm in a very complicated situation. Could you tell him that yourself?" Agalarov asked the bureaucrat, he recounted in his 2016 interview. His efforts produced a handwritten note from Putin and a traditional lacquered box, gifts that Trump happily accepted.

Those contacts put Agalarov in a privileged position after Trump's unexpected, and apparently Russian-backed, rise to the presidency of the United States.

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