Paul Manafort, the one-time advisor to disgraced former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, was hailed as a great asset when he was taken on a few months ago as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign chairman.
But with the latest revelations about shady deals Manafort seems to have been involved in while in Ukraine, he’s looking more like a serious liability.
According to various news reports, Manafort allegedly received an undeclared $12.7 million from Yanukovych’s Party of Regions and helped a Yanukovych-linked non-profit organization to secretly route $2.2 million to U.S. lobbyists.
The revelations are seen as further damaging Trump’s now long-shot prospects to win the Nov. 8 U.S. presidential election against Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Manafort also could face criminal charges in the United States and Ukraine for possible tax evasion, money laundering and failure to disclose lobbying on behalf of a foreign government.
Manafort, who was a political consultant who helped Yanukovych regain power after the 2004 Orange Revolution overturned a rigged election in which he was declared the winner, has said that the reports of illegal cash payments were “unfounded, silly and nonsensical.”
He has not yet commented on the transfer of $2.2 million to the United States, but Rick Gates, another Trump aide, and the lobbying firms themselves have admitted the transfer of the funds.
Trump demoted Manafort to a secondary role in his campaign on Aug. 17, seen as a response to the growing concern over the overtly pro-Kremlin ties within the Trump campaign.
Off-the-book payments
The Party of Regions paid over $12.7 million to Manafort in 2007 through 2012, Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau said on Aug. 15.
The bureau said there were 22 accounting entries related to Manafort in a hand-written Party of Regions ledger thought to have been discovered when anti-government protesters ransacked the party’s office in Kyiv during the EuroMaidan Revolution. The Times, a London newspaper, said on Aug. 17 that it had obtained 12 of the entries, and it published three of them.
The anti-graft bureau published all 22 entries on Manafort on Aug. 18.
The payments intended for Manafort were among $2 billion in secret payments allegedly made by the Party of Regions to bribe officials and politicians from 2007 to 2012. The accounting ledgers were given to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine in May by Viktor Trepak, an ex-deputy chief of the Security Service of Ukraine.
Yanukovych lobbyist?
The Associated Press also reported on Aug. 17, citing sources with knowledge of the matter, that Manafort and Rick Gates had helped to channel $2.2 million from the European Center for a Modern Ukraine, a non-profit linked to Yanukovych’s regime, to U.S. lobbying firms Podesta Group and Mercury.
The lobbying firms were paid to advocate positions in line with those of Yanukovych’s government, including downplaying the necessity for a congressional resolution to pressure Yanukovych to release his imprisoned political rival Yulia Tymoshenko, according to the AP.
Podesta Group is headed by Tony Podesta, the brother of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta, while the head of Mercury is Vin Weber, an ex-advisor to Republican Mitt Romney.
Meanwhile, Ina Kirsch, head of the European Center for a Modern Ukraine, is also mentioned in the off-the-book ledgers, Sergii Leshchenko, a lawmaker from the Petro Poroshenko Bloc, told the Kyiv Post. Kirsch did not reply to a request for comment.
The Times also reported on Aug. 17, citing a memo written by an unidentified prosecutor, that Manafort had allegedly helped to orchestrate anti-NATO, pro-Russian protests and sabotage U.S. interests in Crimea in 2006.
According to sources cited by the Times, Manafort attended security briefings in an “anti-revolution situation room” during the 2013-14 EuroMaidan Revolution, when more than 100 protesters were killed.
According to other reports, Manafort also unsuccessfully tried to buy an Odesa telecoms firm from offshore companies linked to Yanukovych in 2008 jointly with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, and has attempted to buy New York City properties on behalf of gas mogul Dmytro Firtash, a Yanukovych ally.
Getting rich
The Fusion news site reported on Aug. 17 that Manafort had gotten wealthy during his stint as a Yanukovych consultant and had purchased more than $11 million worth of U.S. real estate during that period.
Fusion also reported, citing documents recovered after Yanukovych fled Ukraine, that Manafort helped coordinate a Skadden Arps report intended to show that Tymoshenko’s imprisonment was justified. The report was spearheaded by former Obama White House counsel Gregory Craig.
Manafort’s daughter Andrea started working at Skadden Arps in 2012.
No charges likely
Prosecuting Manafort will be hard, however.
The entries in the Party of Regions ledgers do not necessarily mean that Manafort actually received the money, as the payments intended for Manafort were actually given to other people, whose signatures are indicated, the anti-graft bureau said on Aug. 15.
The signatures have not yet been verified, and the entries cannot be cross-referenced against banking records.
So far there is no evidence that Manafort himself received the money, and therefore he is “highly unlikely” to be charged in Ukraine, Artur Kyyan, a lawyer at Ukraine’s Lavrynovych and Partners law firm, told the Kyiv Post.
Even if Ukraine starts a criminal case against Manafort, his extradition from the United States would be almost impossible, Mykola Gnatovsky, an international law professior at Kyiv National University, said by phone.
“Considering U.S. practice, this is practically hopeless,” he said. “This is in the realm of science fiction.”
The U.S. does not trust Ukraine because it “doesn’t have a functioning judicial system,” Gnatovsky said.
However, lawyers say that Manafort could be charged in the United States with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act for failing to disclose both the alleged $7.6 million payments in the accounting ledgers, and the $2.2 million transfer to the lobbying firms. Under the act, all lobbyists must report on their services to foreign governments to the U.S. Department of Justice.
If Manafort’s guilt is proven in court, he could be fined up to $250,000 or jailed for up to five years, Kyyan said.
And if the report of the $2.2 million transfer is true, “there are grounds for at least starting a criminal investigation in Ukraine,” Sergey Grebenyuk, a partner at Egorov, Puginsky, Afanasiev and Partners, told the Kyiv Post. Possible charges could include tax evasion and money laundering, he added.
Trump slips in polls
Trump’s rating continued to slide after the revelations about Manafort’s alleged financial dealings with the Yanukovych regime were published. The reports came after a slew of other Trump insults and attacks, including his seeming endorsement of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and call for an end to anti-Kremlin sanctions, each of which provoked criticism.
“That said, if it can be conclusively proven that Manafort was on the take with Yanukovych, that will serve to discredit Trump even more among the Republican elite, who are increasingly unenthusiastic about him as it is,” Alexander J. Motyl, a political science professor at Rutgers University in the United States, told the Kyiv Post. “Trump appears to be self-destructing.”
Motyl said, however, that “most Americans care little about foreign policy – and about Ukraine even less.”
Still, the exposure of ties to the Yanukovych government and Trump’s rhetoric on Russia and Ukraine may drive even more Republican voters away from Trump.
“All of it has pushed (Republicans) into the position where they don’t believe Trump has the knowledge,” Reno Domenico, chairman of Democrats Abroad, told the Kyiv Post. “He can hardly read from a teleprompter let alone have an in-depth understanding of these questions.”
Domenico said that Trump “completely misanswered by not really being knowledgeable about the fact that Crimea is gone, which is a kind of thing that scares a lot of people. We have considerable evidence that the Russian security services penetrated the emails and database services of the Democratic National Committee. And then we have the candidate who stands on TV and asks the Russian security services to continue to probe. This is un-American. You can begin to make the argument that it’s treasonous.”
