Of all the suspicious and criminal activity that U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has dug up in his year-old investigation of U.S. President Donald J. Trump, one of the least suspicious is the April 9 revelation that U.S. prosecutors are looking into Ukrainian billionaire oligarch Victor Pinchuk’s $150,000 honorarium to then-candidate Trump on Sept. 11, 2015.
The money came for 21 minutes of Trump’s precious time in a live video feed at Pinchuk’s annual Yalta European Strategy conference.
I was in the room, like hundreds of other conference attendees, and wrote about Trump’s obnoxious performance, in which he described the nation as “The Ukraine” numerous times and showed no depth of knowledge. The video was also memorable for sound problems.
A better description than suspicious: Waste of money.
If any crime was committed, it would have to be on Trump’s side, either because spending of the money violated some law that regulates the non-profit Trump Foundation, where the deposit went, or because he evaded taxes on the money. (It is, incidentally, close to the $130,000 sum that he paid porn star Stormy Daniels the next year for staying quiet about their 2006 one-night stand.)
Since Pinchuk’s payment to Trump was arranged by his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, the truth shall be known since the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation this week searched Cohen’s office and seized computers and correspondence, in a court-approved search warrant.
Cohen is in trouble so deep that it’s hard to fathom anything less than prison or a big fine after his inevitable conviction. No, I do not know the evidence against him, but how can anyone be a lawyer for Trump for years without breaking a law or two?
As for Pinchuk, he’s in the clear on this one, I would say.
Sure the payment is extravagant and outrageous, but this is the way Victor rolls.
He spends millions of dollars in honorariums for his annual YES forum, relocated in 2014 to Kyiv after Russia stole the Crimean peninsula, and for his series of public lectures and other events.
Over the years, Pinchuk has brought the likes of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair, David Cameron, Elton John, Paul McCartney, Paul Krugman, Newt Gingrich and Condoleezza Rice to Ukraine, to name only a partial list.
They don’t come cheaply, and people can easily guess the rates by simply calling their speakers’ bureaus or agents and asking how much they charge for a speech.
We did so after ex-U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates spoke at one of the YES forums and I got the golden opportunity to interview him in 2016 for 15 minutes or so.
We wanted to invite him to our annual Kyiv Post Tiger Conference, which takes place on the first Tuesday in December. We were told, to my recollection, that Gates would be happy to come: $350,000 plus business-class airfare and all expenses covered. In any case, alas, the Kyiv Post cannot afford honorariums. We rely on people willing to come for expenses only.
But billionaire Pinchuk can afford such staggering sums. It’s all on the website of his Victor Pinchuk Foundation.
He also sponsors a luncheon gathering at the annual Munich Security Conference and World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He doles out scholarships to hundreds of students in his WorldWide Studies and Zavtra.ua program to get educated at leading universities abroad. Some of the recipients are sitting in parliament and in top business, governmental or non-governmental organization positions today.
He gives to the Clinton Global Initiative (more than $8.6 million), the Brookings Institution, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the Open Society Institute, the Aspen Institute, the Elena Pinchuk ANTIAIDS Foundation and many other organizations and causes.
By the end of 2017, according to the foundation, he had given away more than $125 million of his fortune.
He joined the Bill Gates-inspired the Giving Pledge in 2013, in which billionaires volunteer to give away most of their wealth to philanthropic causes during their lifetime. Forbes recently estimated the 57-year-old’s tycoon’s fortune at $1.4 billion.
His heart may be big and generous today, but it wasn’t always that way. And we profiled him on Oct. 14, 2016 for the Kyiv Post “Oligarch Watch” series.
Pinchuk is engaged in a lifelong campaign to rehabilitate his reputation and that of his father-in-law, ex-President Leonid Kuchma, whose corruption as the nation’s leader from 1994-2005 is the main reason that Ukraine today is lagging so far behind the rest of the world in economic development, Western integration and democratic institutions.
Kuchma remains the unindicted suspect in ordering the Sept. 16, 2000, murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze, the founder of Ukrainska Pravda and a martyr for independent journalism. Sadly, on July 20, 2016, journalist Pavel Sheremet joined the ranks of martyrs, killed in an unsolved car bomb blast.
Kuchma has always denied his guilt, but his administration and prosecutors did nothing but obstruct the investigation into the kidnapping and savage decapitation.
Just like Richard Nixon carried his sins to his grave, Kuchma’s legacy will forever be a burden on his conscience, if he has one.
As for Pinchuk, he got rich while his father-in-law was president, a time when Ukrainians had no transparent and competitive sales of state assets inherited by Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The nation then had no rule of law or an independent judicial system and still does not. And back then, independent journalism was practically non-existent, except at the Kyiv Post and a few other brave outlets. TV news outlets were controlled by censors like Viktor Medvedchuk, Kuchma’s former chief-of-staff. Elections were not honest.
He’s still no slouch at making money, reportedly accepting a $1 billion settlement in 2016 to settle his business dispute with two other Ukrainian oligarchs, Igor Kolomoisky and Gennadiy Bogolyubov.
He also spends lavishly not only on honorariums and charity, but on personal luxuries as well, buying one of London’s most expensive homes and shelling out more than $6 million to celebrate his 50th birthday in 2010.
But times and people change.
It’s sad — for them, perhaps, but mainly for all of us interested in justice — that Kuchma, Pinchuk and the rest of Ukraine’s oligarchs or corrupt politicians will never have a chance to be exonerated or convicted in a fair and open public trial. Ukraine’s judicial system is simply incapable of delivering justice that anybody trusts.
The people who run the country will never face criminal charges, go to prison or lose their assets. President Petro Poroshenko, like the four presidents before him, will see to it.
Ukraine is not strong enough to confront its rich or powerful, despite two successful revolutions.
As European Union Ambassador to Ukraine Hugues Mingarelli aptly describes how the nation worked (and still does in some ways): “This country has been a cash machine for about 10 or 15 people and the whole country has been shaped for the benefit of these people.”
While Mingarelli wouldn’t name names out of diplomatic courtesy, I will.
Those 10 or 15 who run or ran the country include Kuchma, Pinchuk, Poroshenko, Viktor Yanukovych, Medvedchuk, Rinat Akhmetov, Dmytro Firtash, Oleg Kolomoisky, Gennady Bogolyubov, Yuriy Boiko, Serhiy Lyvovchkin, Yulia Tymoshenko and on and on down the list of Ukraine’s richest people.
As a class, if completely innocent in a legal sense, their collective moral failing is that they have been better at acquiring and monopolizing wealth than creating it – much less putting it to use in building a nation.
And so we are where are in Ukraine — the second-poorest nation in Europe, people fleeing abroad by the millions, foreign direct investment only trickling in, when it should be flooding in given Ukraine’s educated workforce, modest salary demands and prime location in Europea, with big advantages in informational technology, agriculture and manufacturing.
Pinchuk still complains about the Kyiv Post’s coverage and quite directly to us, to his credit, finding it offensive and unfair at times. But he’s secure enough to accept criticism and realize it comes with the territory of being a powerful public figure.
Plus, Pinchuk’s legacy is changing for the better. His charitable contributions have improved many lives and introduced the country to famous people with great ideas, those to whom he paid generous honorariums to come here. Let’s face it, most of them wouldn’t come to Ukraine without being paid.
And the Kyiv Post decided several years ago, rightly or wrongly, to work with Pinchuk.
Consequently, we are a media partner of the YES forum and Pinchuk sponsors the annual Kyiv Post Top 30 Under 30 Awards, honoring the nation’s outstanding young leaders at the Tiger Conference.
So, presumably, when it comes to investigating Pinchuk’s $150,000 contribution to Trump, U.S law enforcement will find nothing more sinister than one rich and famous guy buying the time of an even richer and even more famous guy — or at least 21 minutes of it.
