Paul Manafort, who dispensed political advice to ex-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and U.S. President Donald J. Trump, pleaded guilty in federal court in Washington D.C. on Sept. 14 under an agreement that requires him to cooperate with U.S. special counsel Robert S. Mueller.
The agreement avoids a trial set to start on Sept. 17 trial set over allegations that he engaged in an illegal lobbying campaign on behalf of the Yanukovych administration, which governed Ukraine from 2010 until the EuroMaidan Revolution overthrew him on Feb. 22, 2014.
Manafort admitted guilt to one charge of conspiracy and one charge of witness tampering, and will forfeit $46 million, as well as four homes. During the plea hearing, special counsel unit prosecutor Andrew Weissman told the judge that Manafort would cooperate with the investigation.
The plea includes admissions to a host of financial crimes, including tax fraud, money laundering, failing to register as a foreign agent, perjury and conspiracy to obstruct justice.
Serhiy Lovochkin, Manafort’s employer and link in the Party of Regions as well as Yanuovych’s former chief of staff, declined to comment when confronted by the Kyiv Post at the Yalta European Strategy conference in Kyiv.
“It’s not my trial,” he said. “No comment.”
Former Polish President Aleksandr Kwasniewski, one of the members of the so-called Hapsburg Group that Manafort created to secretly lobby the European Union and U.S. on the Yanukovych government’s behalf, refused to discuss the allegations in Manafort’s plea.
“That is a problem of Manafort and the American court,” Kwasniewski said. “I have no information.”
Manafort’s plea includes admissions that he laundered more than $30 million in proceeds from his work for the Party of Regions. His defense attorney said during the hearing that he would admit to guilt on remaining, deadlocked charges from his August tax fraud trial in Northern Virginia. The charges come in a criminal information, a legal instrument used in the United States to precede a guilty plea.
‘Bada bing bada boom’
The filing goes into depth on Manafort’s secret lobbying campaign on behalf of the Yanukovych government.
Much of it concerned the prosecution of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Her imprisonment caused an outcry in the West, but one aim of Manafort’s lobbying was to defuse the conflict.
In one exchange, Manafort attempts to “write and disseminate within the United States news stories that alleged that Tymoshenko had paid for the murder of a Ukrainian official.”
“My goal is to plant some stink on Tymo,” he wrote in one message cited in the filing.
In another portion, the 69-year-old political consultant secretly coordinates with Israeli government officials to imply that Tymoshenko was anti-Semitic, while using the same campaign to suggest that U.S. President Barack Obama was failing to combat anti-Semitism in Ukraine.
“Manafort orchestrated a scheme to have, as he wrote in a contemporaneous communication, “[O]bama Jews” put pressure on the Administration to disavow Tymoshenko and support Yanukovych,” prosecutors write in the filing.
Manafort was pitching stories to U.S. newspapers regarding an alliance between Tymoshenko and an allegedly anti-semitic political party, as part of a bid to “undermine United States support for Tymoshenko.”
As part of the effort, Manafort worked with an Israeli official to release a statement publicizing the story, the filing reads. In a coordinated effort, Manafort would use the upcoming Israeli statement to help convince editors to run the story.
But it had an added benefit for the political consultant, the filing reads: “MANAFORT sought to have the Administration understand that ‘the Jewish community will take this out on Obama on election day if he does nothing.’”
“I have someone pushing it on the New York Post,” he wrote. “Bada bing bada boom.”
Follow the money
The court filing states that Manafort hired a number of lobbying firms in the United States to lobby the American government.
Overseeing the firms in name but not in deed was the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, a Brussels-based nongovernmental organization headed by a German woman named Ina Kirsch.
“It’s like Alice in Wonderland,” one lobbying firm employee is quoted in the court document as saing. “An employee of Company B described the Centre as a fig leaf, and the Centre’s written certification that it was not related to the Party of Regions as ‘a fig leaf on a fig leaf,’ referring to the Centre in an email as the ‘European hot dog stand for a Modern Ukraine.’”
Manafort also hired three European politicians to lobby the European Union and U.S. on behalf of the Yanukovych administration – former Polish President Aleksandr Kwasniewski, former Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer, former Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi.
Kwasniewski was a European Parliament representative at the time. With Irish politician Pat Cox, he travlled to Ukraine on a monitoring mission charged specifically with investigating the Tymoshenko prosecution.
“Manafort solicited [Kwasniewski] to provide Manafort inside information about the European Parliament’s views and actions toward Ukraine and to take actions favorable to Ukraine. Manafort also used this Hapsburg Group member’s current European Parliament position to Ukraine’s advantage in his lobbying efforts in the United States,” the filing reads. “Manafort told his lobbyists to stress to the senators that the former Polish president who was advocating against the resolution was currently a designated representative of the president of the European Parliament, to give extra clout to his supposedly independent judgment against the Senate resolution.”
Prosecutors also say that a law firm hired to whitewash the Tymoshenko prosecution – Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom – performed far more work on behalf of Yanukovych than previously known.
The filings states that Skadden “was retained to represent Ukraine itself, including in connection with the Tymoshenko case and to provide training to the trial team prosecuting Tymoshenko.”
Forfeiture
Apart from cooperation, the agreement includes the forfeiture of $46 million across multiple bank accounts, and four homes at least partly paid for with the proceeds of his Party of Regions work.
Manafort’s trial in Virginia on tax charges revealed a complex Cyprus-based scheme in which he received millions of dollars from multiple Ukrainian oligarchs.
By far the biggest payer was Yanukovych chief of staff Serhiy Lovochkin, who funnelled more than $40 million to Manafort. When asked, Lovochkin denied any involvement.
Bloc Petro Poroshenko member of parliament Mustafa Nayyem, when asked about Manafort’s plea, said “I personally was waiting for that for 12 years.”
In 2006, Nayyem was one of the first Ukrainian journalists to write in-depth about Manafort’s work for the Party of Regions.
“All these 12 years Party of Regions and their allies were saying that he did it pro bono. Now there’s a court decision [showing the opposite],” Nayyem said. “All Party of Regions – those who worked with him, paid him some money – should be questioned. First of all Rinat Akhmetov.”
“They should be prosecuted,” he added.
