Paul Manafort

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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby Iamwhomiam » Thu May 25, 2017 10:02 pm

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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri May 26, 2017 9:22 pm

Russian Once Tied to Trump Aide Seeks Immunity to Testify Before Congress
Image
Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who is close to President Vladimir V. Putin, in Davos, Switzerland, last year.
SIMON DAWSON / BLOOMBERG
By BARRY MEIER and JESSE DRUCKER
MAY 26, 2017
Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian oligarch once close to President Trump’s former campaign manager, has offered to cooperate with congressional committees investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election, but lawmakers are unwilling to accept his conditions, according to congressional officials.

Mr. Deripaska’s offer comes amid increased attention to his ties to Paul Manafort, who is one of several Trump associates under F.B.I. scrutiny for possible collusion with Russia during the presidential campaign. The two men did business together in the mid-2000s, when Mr. Manafort, a Republican operative, was also providing campaign advice to Kremlin-backed politicians in Ukraine. Their relationship subsequently soured and devolved into a lawsuit.

Mr. Deripaska, an aluminum magnate who is a member of the inner circle of the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, recently offered to cooperate with congressional intelligence committees in exchange for a grant of full immunity, according to three congressional officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue publicly. But the Senate and House panels turned him down because of concerns that immunity agreements create complications for federal criminal investigators, the officials said.

Mr. Deripaska, who lives in Moscow, has long had difficulty traveling to the United States. The State Department has refused to issue him a business visa because of concerns over allegations that he was connected to organized crime, according to a former United States government official, which Mr. Deripaska has denied.

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Mr. Deripaska, left, with President Putin in Yaroslavl, Russia, last year.
DMITRY AZAROV / KOMMERSANT, VIA GETTY IMAGES
But he was able to enter the country in another way during that period, according to previously undisclosed court documents. Mr. Deripaska came to the United States eight times between 2011 and 2014 with government permission as a Russian diplomat, according to affidavits he gave in a little-noticed lawsuit in a Manhattan court. Mr. Deripaska said in the court papers that his visits were brief and made in connection with meetings of the G-20 and the United Nations, not to conduct business.


The court documents and public records show that Mr. Deripaska, whose companies have long had offices in New York, has expanded his American holdings over the past 10 years, buying high-priced Manhattan townhouses and a major stake in a Russian-language newspaper in New York.

The lawsuit was brought by Alexander Gliklad, a Russian-born businessman, who charged that Mr. Deripaska had used his diplomatic status as a cover to do business, which the oligarch denied. Mr. Gliklad claims he is entitled to collect funds that Mr. Deripaska had agreed to pay to settle a lawsuit with a man who owed Mr. Gliklad money from a court judgment. Last month, a New York State Supreme Court justice rejected Mr. Gliklad’s argument that the Manhattan court had jurisdiction over Mr. Deripaska.

As Mr. Manafort’s dealings with Russia-friendly Ukrainian politicians, business activities and loans have come under examination in recent months, his former client has gotten caught up in the media scrutiny. The two men were partners in an offshore fund set up in 2007 to buy telecommunications and cable television assets in Ukraine, where Mr. Manafort had advised then-President Viktor F. Yanukovych. That deal fell apart, winding up in litigation in the Cayman Islands.


Paul Manafort spoke to reporters after a night at the Republican National Convention in July 2016 in Cleveland. Mr. Manafort is under F.B.I. scrutiny; he conducted business with Mr. Deripaska in the mid-2000s.
SAM HODGSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
In March, Mr. Deripaska took out newspaper ads stating that he was willing to participate in hearings before Congress after The Associated Press published a report alleging that Mr. Manafort had provided him with a plan in 2005 outlining steps to “greatly benefit the Putin government,” by influencing politics and news coverage in the United States. Mr. Deripaska has denied ever entering into such an arrangement and sued The A.P. for libel last month. The news organization has said it stands by its article. Mr. Manafort has denied that his work for the oligarch was aimed at aiding the Russian government.

There are no indications thus far that the F.B.I. is seeking to interview Mr. Deripaska as part of the continuing investigation into Russian interference in the presidential election.

Michael J. Gottlieb, a lawyer at the firm representing Mr. Deripaska in the libel action, did not respond to a request for comment about his offer to cooperate with congressional investigators. Adam Waldman, a Washington lobbyist representing Mr. Deripaska, did not respond to an email seeking comment.

For years, Mr. Putin complained about the State Department’s refusal to issue Mr. Deripaska a visa. “They give us nothing, explain to us nothing, and forbid him from entry,” Mr. Putin told the French newspaper Le Monde in 2008.


It is considered difficult to deny diplomatic visas to people carrying the proper credentials issued by their own countries. A State Department spokesman, William B. Cocks, said he could not discuss individual visa issues, citing confidentiality. But speaking generally, he said diplomats coming to the United States received a special visa while foreigners doing business in this country needed a business visa.


The timing of Mr. Deripaska’s diplomatic visits to the United States are notable because they began after the F.B.I. withdrew from a secret deal that allowed him into the country. In 2008, the F.B.I., over State Department objections, arranged for him to receive a special visa after he agreed to help the bureau find a retired agent, Robert Levinson, who had disappeared in Iran the year before. F.B.I. officials ended the deal in 2009 after concluding that the arrangement was not fruitful, according to former officials at the bureau.

He sought to get a visa in 2015 to testify in the Manhattan court case, according to court filings, but the State Department refused to issue him one.

Mr. Deripaska, whose net worth has been estimated at $5.3 billion by Forbes, has global business interests and sits atop a number of companies, including United Company Rusal and Basic Element, which includes businesses ranging from agriculture to aviation to automobiles.

According to filings in the Manhattan lawsuit, Mr. Deripaska’s investments in the United States over the past decade include two Manhattan townhouses bought through shell companies owned by a British Virgin Islands trust. Records show one of those properties, in Greenwich Village, was purchased in 2006 for $4.5 million; the other building, on the Upper East Side, was bought two years later for $42.5 million. In 2014, he acquired a 50 percent stake in the largest Russian-language newspaper in the United States, V Novom Svete, or In The New World, located in Lower Manhattan, court filings state.

He also agreed to “support” a hedge fund run by the former president of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn, by investing in it through an offshore shell company, according to one filing. Through his assistant, Mr. Wolfensohn declined to comment. A spokesman in Moscow for one of Mr. Deripaska’s companies did not respond to questions about the business dealings

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/u ... 0&referer=
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue May 30, 2017 6:33 pm

Belize launches investigation into money laundering by Yanukovych, Manafort – Bloomberg

Belize authorities have launched an investigation into money laundering by former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and American political advisor Paul Manafort, according to Bloomberg. Economy 16:30, 22 May 2017 561 READ LATER REUTERS In the five-year period from 2007 to 2012, Manafort was paid at least $12.7 million, according to a handwritten Party of Regions ledger found later in its head office, Bloomberg reported. Ukraine's anti-corruption bureau and the FBI are investigating whether the ledger reflected any illegal payments to Manafort and to others. Manafort's spokesman says that after being paid he had many expenses and so the payment figure does not represent profit. One payment to Manafort on the ledger matches an invoice he signed in 2009 to sell $750,000 of computers to a Belize-registered company called Neocom Systems Ltd., according to documents obtained by Ukrainian MP Leshchenko from Manafort's Kyiv office. Read also Manafort falsified invoice to Belize company to legitimize Yanukovych's $750,000 payment to himself – Ukrainian MP Doug Singh, who runs International Corporate Services (ICS), which registered Neocom in 2007, says he's received multiple requests for records from Belize's Financial Intelligence Unit, which investigates money laundering. Belize authorities declined further comment. Evgeniy Kaseev, listed as a director of Neocom, couldn't be reached for comment. Manafort's spokesman disputed the authenticity of the invoice and said Manafort is unfamiliar with it. UNIAN memo. According to the investigation by The New York Times, former head of Trump campaign Manafort could receive $12.7 million from the "black ledgers" of the Party of Regions, at the times of his cooperation with Viktor Yanukovych. Before joining Trump's election campaign, Manafort's most prominent client was ex-President of Ukraine Vitkor Yanukovych. Manafort played the role of political adviser and advisor, eventually helped the Party of Regions and Yanukovych win several election campaigns in Ukraine.

https://www.unian.info/economics/193554 ... mberg.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Jun 02, 2017 6:26 pm

Special Counsel’s Trump Probe Adds Manafort Case
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FILE - In this July 18, 2016, file photo, Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort walks around the convention floor before the opening session of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Hillary Clinton’s campaign is questioning Donald Trump’s top political aide’s ties to a pro-Kremlin political party in Ukraine, claiming it is evidence of the Republican nominee’s cozy relationship with Russia. The New York Times reported that handwritten ledgers found in Ukraine show $12.7 million in undisclosed payments to Paul Manafort from the pro-Russia party founded by the country’s former president Viktor Yanukovych. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)
Carolyn Kaster/AP
By Associated Press Published JUNE 2, 2017 5:41 PM
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The Associated Press has learned that the special counsel running the U.S. investigation into possible ties between President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia’s government has assumed oversight of an ongoing investigation involving former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

The investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller may also expand to look into the roles of the attorney general and deputy attorney general in the firing of FBI Director James Comey.

The Justice Department’s criminal investigation into Manafort, who was forced to resign in August amid questions over his past business dealings in Ukraine, predated the election and the counterintelligence probe investigating possible collusion between Moscow and associates of Donald Trump.

The move to consolidate the matters indicates that Mueller is assuming a broad mandate in his new role.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/speci ... e-manafort
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jun 19, 2017 10:09 pm

At height of Russia tensions, Trump campaign chairman Manafort met with business associate from Ukraine

Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, walks the floor at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on July 21, 2016. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
By Rosalind S. Helderman, Tom Hamburger and Rachel Weiner June 19 at 11:44 AM
In August, as tension mounted over Russia’s role in the U.S. presidential race, Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, sat down to dinner with a business associate from Ukraine who once served in the Russian army.

Konstantin Kilimnik, who learned English at a military school that some experts consider a training ground for Russian spies, had helped run the Ukraine office for Manafort’s international political consulting practice for 10 years.

At the Grand Havana Room, one of New York City’s most exclusive cigar bars, the longtime acquaintances “talked about bills unpaid by our clients, about [the] overall situation in Ukraine . . . and about the current news,” including the presidential campaign, according to a statement provided by Kilimnik, offering his most detailed account of his interactions with the former Trump adviser.

Kilimnik, who provided a written statement to The Washington Post through Manafort’s attorney, said the previously unreported dinner was one of two meetings he had with Manafort on visits to the United States during Manafort’s five months working for Trump. The first encounter was in early May 2016, about two weeks before the Trump adviser was elevated to campaign chairman.

The August dinner came about two weeks before Manafort resigned under pressure amid reports that he had received improper payments for his political work in Ukraine, allegations that he has denied.

Sean Spicer said using Paul Manafort, who was Trump's campaign manager for part of the 2016 presidential race, as an example to prove collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia is "ridiculous," because he was an "individual who was there for a short period of time." (Video: Reuters / Photo: Jabin Bostford/The Washington Post)
Kilimnik is of interest to investigators on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is examining possible links between the Trump campaign and Russia, said a person familiar with the inquiry.

Kilimnik’s name also appeared this spring in a previously undisclosed subpoena sought by federal prosecutors looking for information “concerning contracts for work . . . communication or other records of correspondence” related to about two dozen people and businesses that appeared to be connected to Manafort or his wife, including some who worked with Manafort in Kiev.

The subpoena was issued by a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia, where, until recently, Manafort’s business was headquartered. The subpoena did not specify whether it was related to the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the U.S. election or a separate inquiry into Manafort’s business activities. Investigators in the Eastern District of Virginia have been assisting with the Russia investigation.

In Ukraine, Kilimnik’s political adversaries have said he may be working with Russian intelligence. U.S. officials have not made that charge.

Kilimnik rejected the allegation, telling The Post in his written statement that he has “no relation to the Russian or any other intelligence service.”

His dinner with Manafort came as Trump’s campaign chairman was facing mounting questions about his work in Ukraine and his business ties to allies of Russian President Vladi­mir Putin.

Kilimnik said his meetings with Manafort were “private visits” that were “in no way related to politics or the presidential campaign in the U.S.” He said he did not meet with Trump or other campaign staff members, nor did he attend the Republican National Convention, which took place shortly before the Grand Havana Room session. However, he said the meetings with Manafort included discussions “related to the perception of the U.S. presidential campaign in Ukraine.”

As a lobbyist and political consultant in the 1980s, Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort worked with international clients that included two dictators who were then allied with the United States. (Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)
Manafort spokesman Jason Maloni said that Kilimnik was a “longtime business associate” who would have naturally been in touch with Manafort. Manafort told Politico, which first reported his relationship with Kilimnik, that his conversations included discussions about the cyberattack on the Democratic National Committee and the release of its emails.

“It would be neither surprising nor suspicious that two political consultants would chat about the political news of the day, including the DNC hack, which was in the news,” Maloni said.

He added, “We’re confident that serious officials will come to the conclusion that Paul’s campaign conduct and interaction with Konstantin during that time was perfectly permissible and not in furtherance of some conspiracy.”

Before joining Trump’s campaign, Manafort had built a practice in Ukraine as an adviser to the Russia-friendly Party of Regions and helped elect former president Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted in 2014 and fled to Russia. Manafort kept his Kiev office open until mid-2015.

Federal investigators have shown an interest in Manafort on several fronts beyond his work on behalf of Trump.

Subpoenas in New York have sought information about Manafort’s real estate loans, according to NBC News. Justice Department officials also are exploring whether Manafort should have more fully disclosed his work for foreign political parties, as required by federal law.


Former FBI director Robert S. Mueller III has been appointed special counsel to oversee the Russia inquiry, and people familiar with his work said his office has now taken over investigations of Manafort’s conduct unrelated directly to the Russia probe.

A spokesman for the Eastern District of Virginia declined to discuss the subpoena there. A spokesman for Mueller also declined to comment.

Manafort’s relationship with Kilimnik shows the challenge facing investigators as they seek to determine whether contacts between Russian allies and Trump associates during the height of Russian interference in the campaign amounted to collusion or reflected routine interactions between people with relationships unrelated to the campaign.

Kilimnik said he grew up in southeastern Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union. He said he moved to Moscow in 1987, when he was 17, and enrolled in the Military Institute of the Ministry for Defense, an elite academy for training military translators.

Kilimnik said he was trained in English and Swedish and spent the early 1990s serving as a military translator, including in 1993 on a trade mission of a Russian arms company.

He said the GRU, the military intelligence service that U.S. officials have linked to the 2016 cyberattacks, did not recruit from his language academy.

“No one ever spoke to me ever about doing any intelligence work — neither Russians or Ukrainians or any other foreign country,” he said.

Some experts disputed Kilimnik’s description of the Moscow academy.

Stephen Blank, a Russia expert at the American Foreign Policy Council, a Washington think tank, and a longtime former instructor at the U.S. Army War College, called the institute a “breeding ground” for intelligence officers.

Mark Galeotti, a Russia security specialist at the Institute of International Relations, a Prague-based foreign policy think tank, said the school is one of the “favored recruiting grounds” of the GRU.

In 1995, amid uncertainty in the post-Soviet economy, Kilimnik said he needed money and took a job as a translator for the International Republican Institute, a pro-democracy group affiliated with the U.S. Republican Party.

People who worked with Kilimnik said he was proficient in several languages and a savvy reader of people.

“I relied on him,” said Sam Patten, who was Kilimnik’s boss at the Moscow office of IRI from 2001 to 2004.

At the time, Kilimnik openly discussed his work in the Russian army, said Phil Griffin, a political consultant who hired him at the IRI. “He was completely upfront about his past work with Russian military intelligence,” Griffin said. “It was no big deal.”

Julia Sibley, a spokeswoman for the IRI, confirmed that Kilimnik worked for the organization a decade ago but declined to provide additional information.

In 2005, Griffin, who had left Moscow to work for Manafort in Ukraine, invited Kilimnik to join him there, according to both men.

Kilimnik said he has worked largely in Ukraine ever since, although he declined to say whether he has become a Ukrainian citizen.

Kilimnik’s role for Manafort grew over time. Beyond his work as a translator, Kilimnik would “help Manafort understand the political context and why people were doing what they were doing,” Patten said.

People familiar with Kilimnik’s work in Ukraine for Manafort say his assignments included meeting with powerful Ukrainian politicians and serving as a liaison to Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, who is close to Putin and did business with Manafort.

A spokeswoman for Deripaska did not respond to a request for comment.

In August, Volodymyr Ariev, a member of the Ukrainian parliament who represents a party that opposed Manafort’s clients, requested that Ukraine’s top prosecutor investigate whether Kilimnik had worked with Russian intelligence services.

A spokeswoman for the prosecutor did not respond to questions from The Post. The prosecutor’s office told Politico in March that Kilimnik was “not being processed now as a witness, suspect or accused.”

Others viewed Kilimnik as more aligned with Washington than Moscow.

Oleg Voloshin, who served as a spokesman for the foreign minister of Ukraine under Yanukovych, said Manafort and Kilimnik were pushing Yanukovych to ally with Europe rather than Russia, which angered some in Yanukovych’s party.

“Kilimnik was always trying to promote this message — if you want to be successful here, you want to look westward,” Voloshin said.

Kilimnik was also well known at the U.S. Embassy, and officials there and at other western embassies appeared to trust him, meeting with him frequently to discuss Ukrainian politics, said people familiar with his work.

“He’s not working for the Russians,” said a foreign policy expert close to Republicans who was working in Ukraine at the time. “If anything, he’s working for us.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... 377a7f1465



Paul Manafort admits he dined with Russian spy figure just before becoming Donald Trump’s campaign chairman
By Bill Palmer
Updated: 10:01 pm EDT Mon Jun 19, 2017 | 0
Home » Politics

On a day in which former Donald Trump adviser Michael Flynn was threatening to take all the unwanted headlines for himself, it turns out former Trump adviser Paul Manafort is suddenly back in the spotlight as well. In response to earlier subpoenas from the Eastern District Court of Virginia, it’s come to light that Manafort had dinner with an alleged Kremlin spy figure just two weeks before he became the chairman of the Trump campaign.



Konstantin Kilimnik is a Ukrainian political operative who is widely suspected by Ukrainians of being a Russian government spy for the Kremlin. His name surfaced in a subpoena, according to the Washington Post (link), prompting him to admit that he did indeed meet with Manafort. But that’s just the beginning.



Manafort is also admitting to the meeting. But both Manafort and Kilimnik are insisting that the dinner somehow had nothing to with the Donald Trump campaign or Russia, and that it was all just a grand coincidence. Kilimnik is also insisting that he has nothing to do with the Kremlin. But Kilimnik does have plenty to do with the Trump campaign. Back in March, it was reported by Politico (link) that he flew to the United States for the Republican National Convention, helping to get the Republican Party platform changed in Russia’s favor.



It’s also notable that while Paul Manafort and Konstantin Kilimnik are both publicly pleading their innocence when it comes to any Trump-Russia collusion, they did both cooperate with the subpoena by providing a response and admitting to their dinner together. This in turn raises the question of what other ways in which Manafort may be cooperating with the Feds. And in almost surreal fashion that may not be coincidental, this comes on the same day that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse stated during a CNN interview that he thinks Michael Flynn has already flipped on Donald Trump.
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/pa ... rman/3532/



Close Manafort Ally Is Latest Trump Campaign Figure Caught In Russia Mess

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, center, talks with production crew during a walk through in preparation for his speech at the Republican National Convention, Thursday, July 21, 2016, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Evan Vucci/AP
By ALLEGRA KIRKLAND Published JUNE 16, 2017 4:35 PM
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The circle of people under scrutiny in the various investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election apparently has widened to include Rick Gates (pictured at left), former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s closest ally on the trail.

According to a memo sent out to former campaign officials and obtained by various news outlets, a lawyer for President Donald Trump’s transition team requested the preservation of all documents related to Russia and Ukraine, as well as travel records and all documents connected to a small handful of former campaign officials. Gates’ name was on that list, sandwiched between other Trump allies known to be under federal investigation like Manafort and Michael Flynn, the ousted national security adviser.

Gates told the New York Times on Thursday that he has not been contacted by federal officials. He brushed aside any allegations of personal wrongdoing, telling the newspaper “Everything was done legally and with the approval of our lawyers.”

“Everybody has tried to take these instances of anyone in the Trump orbit doing something in Russia, and then fast-forwarding however many years, and then saying it is evidence of collusion with Russia on the election,” Gates griped to the Times. “It’s totally ridiculous and without merit.”

Manafort and Gates joined the campaign together in spring 2016 to assist with preparations for the Republican National Convention. The duo was tasked with convincing delegates to vote in Trump’s favor, and worked from a box on Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena nicknamed “The Eagle’s Nest”—a reference to a Nazi Party country home gifted to Adolf Hitler, according to a Daily Beast report.

After Manafort was ousted from the campaign over reports that he received off-the-books payments from a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine, Gates hung on, serving as a liaison to the Republican National Committee and assisting Trump donor Thomas Barrack Jr. with preparations for the inauguration. In January, he joined America First Policies, a new pro-Trump outfit organized by the campaign’s digital director, Brad Parscale, and former surrogate Katrina Pierson. He served there until March, when he reportedly was forced out over concerns about the work he and Manafort undertook in Ukraine.

That work is outlined in detail in the New York Times profile out Friday, which lays out the years Gates has spent as Manafort’s protege. They first crossed paths in 2006 at lobbying firm Davis Manafort, where they worked to bolster the image of Ukraine’s Moscow-friendly former president Viktor Yanukovych. As the Times reported last year, Manafort was slated to receive $12.7 million in cash payments in a secret ledger of cash payments maintained by Yanukovych’s political party.

Gates’ name did not appear in that ledger, but he played a key role in seeking investment deals with Kremlin-allied oligarchs across Eastern Europe such as aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska.

Manafort’s financial dealings have been under scrutiny by federal investigators since 2014, and the federal Russia probe now involves agents from the Treasury Department division specializing in money laundering.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/rick-ga ... sia-probes
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Jun 23, 2017 7:59 pm

Politics

F.B.I. Investigating Deals Involving Paul Manafort and Son-in-Law


Paul Manafort at a meeting in Manhattan in August, days before he resigned as the campaign manager for Donald J. Trump.
CARLO ALLEGRI / REUTERS
By MIKE McINTIRE
JUNE 23, 2017

Federal investigators are examining financial transactions involving Paul Manafort and his son-in-law, who embarked on a series of real estate deals in recent years fueled by millions of dollars from Mr. Manafort, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The transactions involve the financing of apartments and luxury homes in New York and California using money from Mr. Manafort, as well as from other investors solicited by the son-in-law, Jeffrey Yohai, including the actor Dustin Hoffman and his son. F.B.I. agents have reviewed financial records related to Mr. Yohai, who has been accused in a lawsuit of defrauding investors, the sources said.

It was not clear if the F.B.I.’s interest was part of the broader investigation that has ensnared Mr. Manafort, who was President Trump’s campaign chairman until he resigned last August amid reports that he had received millions of dollars in off-the-book payments for his consulting work in Ukraine. Mr. Manafort has been the focus of several inquiries looking into his business activities, failure to file foreign lobbying disclosures and possible collusion between Trump campaign associates and Russia.

Mr. Manafort has emerged as a key figure in the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation, which has focused on interactions between Trump associates and Russians during and after last November’s presidential election. In addition to his work for Ukraine’s former president, an ally of the Russian leader Vladimir V. Putin, Mr. Manafort’s long lobbying and consulting career has included numerous financial dealings with Russian oligarchs. One of his former employees has been investigated in Ukraine on suspicion of having ties to Russian intelligence.


The revelation about investigators’ interest in Mr. Yohai’s activities comes amid indications that the scrutiny of Mr. Manafort has intensified. Besides the F.B.I. and congressional inquiries, the New York State attorney general’s office has opened a preliminary inquiry “focused on certain real estate dealings” involving Mr. Manafort, according to a third person with direct knowledge of the matter.

Last month, The Wall Street Journal reported that federal officials had requested his bank records from Citizens Financial Group, and NBC News said a subpoena had been issued for records related to a $3.5 million loan obtained last August by a shell company, Summerbreeze L.L.C., linked to Mr. Manafort. The New York Times first reported on the existence of the loan in April.

Image
Jeffrey Yohai and Jessica Manafort in 2013. Her sister’s text messages indicated that their father had disapproved of the marriage, but Mr. Yohai and Mr. Manafort soon had business dealings.
PATRICK MCMULLAN / PATRICKMCMULLAN.COM
Mr. Manafort declined to comment. A lawyer for Mr. Yohai did not respond to a request for comment.

The Summerbreeze loan was part of a series of mortgages over the past year, totaling $20 million, secured by properties belonging to Mr. Manafort or his wife. Some of that money appears to have been used by Mr. Manafort to try to salvage his investments with Mr. Yohai. Court records show that Mr. Manafort and his wife invested at least $4 million in several California properties, part of a real estate business that one of Mr. Manafort’s daughters described as a joint venture between her father and Mr. Yohai.

The partnership was unexpected given Mr. Manafort’s early opinion of his son-in-law, as described in text messages belonging to Andrea Manafort, one of Mr. Manafort’s two daughters, which were hacked last year and posted on a website used by Ukrainian hackers. In the messages, Ms. Manafort said in 2013 that her father “wholeheartedly opposes” her sister Jessica’s marriage to Mr. Yohai, whose financial problems had deeply concerned Mr. Manafort.

Yet within two years, Mr. Yohai, who had a degree in journalism and became a real estate professional only in 2011, was forming shell companies to purchase luxury properties in the Hollywood Hills, worth tens of millions of dollars, which Mr. Manafort would put money into. Mr. Manafort was more than a passive investor; Jessica Manafort told her sister last year that Mr. Yohai had “a contract that says dad and him are 50/50 business partners.”

“He flew out to California and helped Jeff completely reorganize and set up his business,” wrote Jessica Manafort, who filed for divorce in March.

While Mr. Yohai borrowed millions from banks and obtained money from investors, he also intimated he had access to large amounts of cash. In January 2016, he offered $7 million in cash for a mansion whose owner, a Russian businessman, was in debt to several associates from Russia who had liens on the house. Mr. Yohai put $160,000 down to secure the mansion deal, but by June 2016 had backed out of it and forfeited the deposit.


A month later he appeared on a reality television show, “Million Dollar Listing,’’ and proposed buying three apartment units in New York City for $15 million in cash; the real estate agent said on the show that he had “seen proof of funds.” When a friend texted Andrea Manafort, asking if her sister and Mr. Yohai really had access to that kind of money, Ms. Manafort replied, “Of course they don’t.”

“Her hubby is running a Ponzi scheme,” Ms. Manafort wrote. “I’m sure of it.”

That is what Mr. Yohai was accused of in a lawsuit filed in November by an investor in Mr. Yohai’s real estate business. The suit asserted that Mr. Yohai employed a “web of dozens of limited liability companies” to repay early investors with money from new investors to create the illusion of a “quick and large return on their investments.”


The lawsuit — filed by Guy Aroch, a fashion photographer who said he invested $2.9 million with Mr. Yohai — also accuses Mr. Yohai of taking advantage of his connection to Mr. Manafort to meet celebrities and public figures. It is unclear how Mr. Hoffman and his son, Jacob, came to invest $3 million in one of Mr. Yohai’s deals that has since gone bankrupt; a photo shows Mr. Yohai and Jacob Hoffman together at a launch party for a website in 2015.

A representative for the Hoffmans did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Yohai denied Mr. Aroch’s accusations in a court filing, and said the lawsuit invoked Mr. Manafort’s name “in an improper effort to attract publicity.” Mr. Yohai and Mr. Manafort have the same lawyer.

“This allegation that I participated in fraud and criminal activity is obviously an extremely derogatory accusation that will harm my reputation,” he said in the filing.

Many of Mr. Manafort’s real estate purchases over the years coincided with his long-running work as a political consultant to the Russia-backed Party of Regions in Ukraine. During his time there, Mr. Manafort used a network of shell companies in the tax havens of Cyprus and Belize to move money around and collect payments from clients, who, in addition to the Ukrainians, included Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch with whom Mr. Manafort partnered in investments.

Back in the United States, Mr. Manafort created still more shell companies to make cash purchases of expensive properties for millions of dollars and other investments. His Los Angeles investments were handled through a limited liability company called Baylor Holding, in which Mr. Manafort and Mr. Yohai were partners, according to court records.


In a deposition related to Mr. Aroch’s lawsuit, Mr. Yohai said his California real estate business operated under the name Marin West and was focused on buying and redeveloping luxury homes in exclusive neighborhoods around Hollywood. Although he was the sole owner of Marin West, Mr. Yohai seemed ignorant of important details, saying he was not sure when it was created or where it was incorporated, and was uncertain who wrote the content for its website. He speculated it could have been written by someone he described as “kind of like the accountant for Marin West.”

“I think he wrote this bio,” Mr. Yohai said, referring to a description of himself that appeared on the site. “I honestly don’t know.”

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/u ... l?referer=
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jun 28, 2017 9:42 am

Manafort Registers As Foreign Agent, Reveals Firm Earned $17 Million for Ukraine Lobbying
By Margaret Hartmann

Manafort forgot to mention his work as a foreign agent.

Paul Manafort became the second former Trump campaign official to retroactively register as a foreign agent on Tuesday, following former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Manafort, who stepped down as Trump’s campaign manager following reports about his work for a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine, disclosed that his firm earned $17.1 million between 2012 and 2014 from former president Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions.

The filing shows that Manafort and his business associate Rick Gates, who also worked for the Trump campaign, gave “strategic counsel and advice to members of the Party of Regions regarding their interaction with U.S. government officials and other Western influential persons to advance the goal of greater political and economic integration between the Ukraine and the West.” The firm also counseled the European Center for a Modern Ukraine, a pro-Yanukovych nonprofit.

Manafort’s firm was hired to help rebrand Yanukovych and the Party of Regions from a pro-Russia party to a pro-European Union party. Manafort signaled that he may register as a foreign agent back in April, when two other U.S. lobbying firms – Mercury and the Podesta Group – disclosed that they were hired for the same purpose.


Just before Manafort stepped down as Trump’s campaign manager in August, the New York Times reported that secret handwritten ledgers show the Party of Regions made nearly two dozen undisclosed cash payments to Manafort, totaling $12.7 million. Those payments were reportedly made between 2007 and 2012, predating the period covered by Tuesday’s disclosure.

Jason Maloni, a Manafort spokesman, said he’s been working on the disclosure since September, “well before any formal investigation of election interference began.”

Maloni also said Manafort was primarily focused on campaign work within Ukraine, and noted that Flynn’s activities were far worse. “Paul’s work ended well before he joined Candidate Trump’s campaign,” Maloni said. “Unlike Flynn, Paul was not simultaneously working as a foreign agent while he was working for Trump.”

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/20 ... bying.html
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Jul 07, 2017 2:50 pm

Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman used an obscure think tank to make D.C. connections for Viktor Yanukovych.
BY ELIAS GROLLJULY 7, 2017

How Paul Manafort Helped Buy Washington Influence for Putin Crony

In May 2013, the Republican lobbyist Vin Weber welcomed Serhiy Klyuyev, one of Ukraine’s most powerful political operatives, to Washington. For two days, Weber squired the member of parliament around Capitol Hill to spread the message that then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was leading his country on the path to reform and was seeking to embrace the West.

Klyuyev had come to Washington as part of a lobbying campaign carried out on behalf of an obscure Brussels-based think tank, the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine (ECFMU), which was founded by veterans of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions. On the recommendation of Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman who worked as a political fixer for Yanukovych, ECFMU hired two powerhouse Washington lobbying firms, the Podesta Group and Mercury LLC.

Working with Manafort and his deputy, the two firms pushed Yanukovych’s agenda in Washington, but none at the time documented their work under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) — passed to counter the influence of foreign propaganda on American politics. In the controversy that has ensued since Trump’s victory and allegations that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Podesta, Mercury, and Manafort’s firm have all conceded that their work benefited the Ukrainian government and have filed paperwork under FARA.

Interviews with individuals who met Podesta and Mercury lobbyists, federal disclosures, and sources close to the two firms describe a lobbying campaign that presented Yanukovych as a reform-minded leader ready to march out from under Russia’s shadow and into the arms of the European Union. Crucially, however, working on behalf of ECFMU created the impression that Podesta and Mercury were not lobbying on behalf of the Ukrainian government but an independent entity. The distinction allowed both Mercury and Podesta to register under less stringent lobbying disclosure rules and reveal less information to the public.

Moreover, ECFMU provides the link between Manafort’s work as a political fixer in Ukraine from 2012 to 2014 and the promotion of Yanukovych’s interests in Washington. “In retrospect, it’s fair to call ECFMU a front group for the Party of Regions to set up a lobbying operation in D.C.,” said one source familiar with the campaign.

Manafort’s lobbying firm, DMP International, maintains in disclosures filed last week that he only provided “advice” to ECFMU, but sources close to Mercury and Podesta dispute that account. Two individuals speaking on condition of anonymity and familiar with the lobbying efforts told Foreign Policy that Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, were in regular contact with Podesta and Mercury lobbyists to discuss the lobbying campaign on behalf of ECFMU. Emails obtained by The Associated Press last year claim that “Gates personally directed the work” of Mercury and Podesta and that Manafort helped coordinate the effort by phone.

“Paul’s primary focus was always directed at domestic Ukrainian political campaign work,” Jason Maloni, a spokesman for Manafort, said in a statement.

Spokesmen for both firms rejected the description of ECFMU as a front for the Party of Regions and said they relied on assurances from Ina Kirsch, the director of the center, that it did not have connections to Yanukovych’s political operation. Kirsch did not respond to questions from FP.

The FBI is now examining Manafort’s work for Yanukovych as part of its wide-ranging probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and whether any Trump aides conspired with that effort.

Set up in 2012, ECFMU ostensibly was founded to advocate for closer ties between Ukraine and the European Union. The think tank’s website is now defunct, but when it was up and running, it listed a mere two staff members. The source of the group’s funding remains unclear, but Ukrainian investigative journalists uncovered evidence indicating that it was backed at high levels by the Party of Regions. Efforts to reach its founders were unsuccessful.

In meetings beginning in 2012 with Washington officials, journalists, NGO officials, and think tank researchers, Podesta and Mercury lobbyists working for ECFMU sought to downplay human rights concerns in Ukraine — principally over the detention of opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko. They also sought to portray Yanukovych as a bona fide reformer and secure support in Washington for a so-called association agreement between Ukraine and the EU, which would move Kiev out of Moscow’s orbit.

The lobbying campaign relied on about a dozen operatives spread across both firms and targeted the Washington foreign-policy establishment. Podesta and Mercury employees met with staff and senior lawmakers on Capitol Hill and administration officials in the White House and State Department.

Despite concerns over Yanukovych’s human rights record and corruption issues, the lobbyists found an opening to bind Washington closer to Kiev. “We weren’t really buying the line that we should ignore the human rights concerns,” said a former State Department official who met with Podesta lobbyists and requested anonymity to describe the meeting. “But we didn’t want to turn our back on Ukraine.”

On Capitol Hill, aides perceived the campaign as a run-of-the-mill lobbying effort. While in Washington, Klyuyev met with Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.), the co-founder of the Congressional Natural Gas Caucus, and later traveled to his Pennsylvania district, a hot spot of shale gas production. Ukraine at the time was eager to develop its own shale gas resources. “This kind of thing happens all the time,” said one Murphy aide.

Concerns over corruption, human rights, and governance had made European officials leery of propping the door wide open to Ukrainian EU membership. But the lobbyists’ message to Washington was, “Don’t let that get in the way of bringing Ukraine into the fold,” said one of the sources familiar with the lobbying effort.

“Another way to look at it could be to say that the campaign was trying to whitewash the terrifically corrupt and kleptocratic system that Yanukovych was running at the time and put a friendly face on it when in fact it was something very different,” said Hannah Thoburn, a research fellow at the Hudson Institute.

Individuals who met with Podesta lobbyists say there was little doubt that the firm was working on behalf of the Yanukovych government, with ECFMU as their ostensible client. “They were actually very upfront about the fact that this group was connected to the government,” said one former Barack Obama administration official, who requested anonymity to describe the encounter.

“It was clear they were representing the Ukrainian government,” said the head of a Washington advocacy group.

A spokesperson for Podesta said its employees at all times made clear that their client was ECFMU, not the Ukrainian government.

As Mercury and Podesta made friends for Kiev in Washington, Yanukovych attempted to play the EU and Russia against one another. The Ukrainian leader gave the EU the impression he would sign an association agreement to bind his country to the union, all the while demanding additional financial support from Brussels. Under intense pressure from Moscow and promises of financial aid and lower gas prices, Yanukovych balked at the last minute.

When he refused to sign the EU deal at a summit meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania, on Nov. 29, 2013, Ukrainians poured into city streets in protest, and the resulting popular uprising soon toppled Yanukovych and laid bare his regime’s fantastic corruption.

Documents revealed Klyuyev, the parliamentarian whom Weber had shepherded around Capitol Hill, as the owner of the president’s fantasyland estate, Mezhyhirya, complete with a private zoo, a collection of rare cars, and even a pirate ship. Ukrainian prosecutors have accused Klyuyev and his brother, who served as Yanukovych’s chief of staff, of fraud related to illegal privatizations and failing to repay loans in excess of $500 million.

Described by anti-corruption activists as one of the masterminds of Yanukovych’s kleptocracy, Klyuyev fled the country in 2015 before he could be arrested. That year, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Klyuyev’s brother, Andriy, for his role in raiding Ukrainian state coffers.

Serhiy Leshchenko, a crusading Ukrainian journalist and now a member of parliament, described the Klyuyev brothers as Yanukovych’s “most loyal and permanent allies.”

“They were architects of Yanukovych’s autocracy and widespread corruption,” Leshchenko said. “They were not only political partners but also in business with Yanukovych.”

Even if their campaign had been for naught, ECFMU represented good business for Podesta and Mercury. Podesta netted $1.2 million for the work; Mercury took home $720,000. In his FARA disclosure filed last week, Manafort revealed that he received more than $17 million in payments from Yanukovych’s Party of Regions.

Podesta, Mercury, and Manafort all maintain that they followed the law in disclosing their lobbying activities, and they are unlikely to face legal consequences for failing to immediately register as foreign agents. The Justice Department historically does not prosecute FARA violators and works to bring them into compliance with the law, rather than filing charges.

In the months since Trump’s election, Manafort has become a liability for the president. The Republican operative’s work on behalf of Yanukovych, currently in exile in Russia, has become a prime example of Trump’s connections to pro-Kremlin figures.

And while Manafort took on lucrative work for a politician now recognized as a Kremlin pawn, there’s a certain irony to the campaign he helped organize: Podesta and Mercury’s Washington operation aimed to bring Ukraine toward the EU and away from Russia, undermining a Kremlin foreign-policy objective.

That lobbying campaign bought the Yanukovych regime time to make its case at high levels of the U.S. government — and Ukrainian officials absolutely loved it. On visits to Washington, Yanukovych’s foreign minister, Leonid Kozhara, would brag about how his government’s lobbying efforts had opened doors, said Anders Aslund, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a well-connected expert on Russian and Ukrainian affairs.

“He boasted how extremely good relations they had with both parties thanks to Podesta and Mercury,” Aslund said. “He loved it that he had all this access. It was all about getting access.”

Kozhara was one of the founders of the ECFMU.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/07/07/how ... tin-crony/
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jul 18, 2017 12:50 am

'You treat me like a baby!': The 'final straw' that reportedly led Trump to oust his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort
Sonam Sheth

4h 21,444

Paul Manafort
Paul Manafort, advisor to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's campaign, checks the teleprompters before Trump's speech at the Mayflower Hotel April 27, 2016 in Washington, DC. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
A new book details the inside story of the fight that reportedly led President Donald Trump to oust Paul Manafort, who served as chairman and, for a time, manager of his campaign.

The book, "Devil's Bargain" by Bloomberg Businessweek correspondent Joshua Green, was previewed in the Daily Mail on Monday.

The book alleges that it was a New York Times article that finally prompted Manafort's removal from the Trump campaign.

The article noted that Trump's aides used TV appearances to get their messages across to him because they found that more effective than communicating face-to-face.

At the urging of Rebekah Mercer, the heavyweight Republican donor who threw her weight behind Trump during the election, Trump reportedly called a meeting the next day with his top staff at his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club. The meeting, Green writes, included Manafort, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Fox News chief Roger Ailes, and Manafort's deputy Rick Gates.


When everybody was assembled, Trump reportedly shouted at Manafort, "How can anybody allow an article that says your campaign is all f---ed up?"

"You think you've gotta go on TV to talk to me? You treat me like a baby!" Trump added, according to Green's account of the meeting.

"Am I like a baby to you? I sit there like a little baby and watch TV and you talk to me? Am I a f---ing baby, Paul?" Trump reportedly continued.

The room then "fell silent," according to the book.

A second Times article the following day appeared to seal Manafort's fate. The report, citing a secret ledger, said Manafort had been paid millions by Ukraine's pro-Russia party. Manafort has a long history of working as a consultant to former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted in 2014 and is currently exiled in Russia.

Green's book reports that aides saw the Times report as the "kill shot" that determined Manafort would be forced out.

Indeed, when Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner came back from his vacation later that week, he reportedly told Manafort, "We've really got a problem here. You're going to have to step down."

Manafort said that if he stepped down, it would "look like I'm guilty," according to Green's account.

It "would be helpful if you stepped down," Kushner reportedly said in response.

"Yes, but I can't do that," Manafort reportedly responded.

It was at that point, the book said, that Kushner made his point clear. "We're putting out a press release at 9 a.m. that says you've resigned," Kushner reportedly said. "That's in 30 seconds."

Manafort resigned on August 19 of last year, opening the door for Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon to take over spearheading the campaign.

http://www.businessinsider.com/new-book ... ort-2017-7[/sub]


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New York Seeks Bank Records of Former Trump Associate Paul Manafort
Loans issued by a bank run by former campaign adviser Steve Calk are focus of subpoena
By Michael Rothfeld
July 17, 2017 5:31 p.m. ET
New York prosecutors have demanded records relating to up to $16 million in loans that a bank run by a former campaign adviser for President Donald Trump made to former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, according to a person familiar with the matter.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-s ... 1500327062
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jul 19, 2017 7:08 pm

Manafort Was in Debt to Pro-Russia Interests, Cyprus Records Show
By MIKE McINTIREJULY 19, 2017


Paul J. Manafort at Trump Tower in Manhattan last August, days before he resigned as Donald J. Trump’s campaign manager. Credit Carlo Allegri/Reuters
Financial records filed last year in the secretive tax haven of Cyprus, where Paul J. Manafort kept bank accounts during his years working in Ukraine and investing with a Russian oligarch, indicate that he had been in debt to pro-Russia interests by as much as $17 million before he joined Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign in March 2016.

The money appears to have been owed by shell companies connected to Mr. Manafort’s business activities in Ukraine when he worked as a consultant to the pro-Russia Party of Regions. The Cyprus documents obtained by The New York Times include audited financial statements for the companies, which were part of a complex web of more than a dozen entities that transferred millions of dollars among them in the form of loans, payments and fees.

Photo

President Vladimir V. Putin with the Russian oligarch Oleg V. Deripaska in 2013. In a 2015 court complaint, Mr. Deripaska claimed that Mr. Manafort and his partners owed him $19 million related to a failed investment in a Ukrainian cable television business. Credit Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters
The records, which include details for numerous loans, were certified as accurate by an accounting firm as of December 2015, several months before Mr. Manafort joined the Trump campaign, and were filed with Cyprus government authorities in 2016. The notion of indebtedness on the part of Mr. Manafort also aligns with assertions made in a court complaint filed in Virginia in 2015 by the Russian oligarch, Oleg V. Deripaska, who claimed Mr. Manafort and his partners owed him $19 million related to a failed investment in a Ukrainian cable television business.

After The Times shared some of the documents with representatives of Mr. Manafort, a spokesman, Jason Maloni, did not dispute that the debts might have existed at one time. But he maintained that the Cyprus records were “stale and do not purport to reflect any current financial arrangements.”

“Manafort is not indebted to Mr. Deripaska or the Party of Regions, nor was he at the time he began working for the Trump campaign,” Mr. Maloni said. “The broader point, which Mr. Manafort has maintained from the beginning, is that he did not collude with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election.” (Mr. Manafort resigned as campaign manager last August amid questions about his past work in Ukraine.)

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A financial statement for a Cyprus shell company, Lucicle Consultants, showing a $9.9 million loan to a Delaware company connected to Mr. Manafort.
Still, the Cyprus documents offer the most detailed view yet into the murky financial world inhabited by Mr. Manafort in the years before he joined the Trump campaign.

Mr. Manafort is one of several former Trump associates known to be the focus of inquiries into Russian meddling in the presidential election. He was among those in attendance at a meeting in June 2016 at which Donald Trump Jr. was told they would receive compromising information on Hillary Clinton from a Russian lawyer connected to the Kremlin.

Mr. Manafort’s Cyprus-related business activities are under scrutiny by investigators looking into his finances during and after his years as a consultant to the Party of Regions in Ukraine. He recently filed a long-overdue report with the Justice Department disclosing his lobbying efforts in Ukraine through early 2014, when his main client, President Viktor F. Yanukovych of Ukraine, was ousted in a popular uprising and fled to Russia.

Photo

Mr. Manafort’s political consulting operation was run out of a first-floor office on Sofiivska Street in Kiev, Ukraine. Credit Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times
The Cyprus documents detail transactions that occurred in 2012 and 2013, during the peak of Mr. Manafort’s decade-long tenure as a political consultant and investor in the former Soviet republic, where his past work remains a source of controversy. Last year, his name surfaced in a handwritten ledger showing $12.7 million designated for him by the Party of Regions, and documents recovered from his former office in Kiev suggest some of that money was routed through offshore shell companies and disguised as payment for computer hardware.

The byzantine nature of the transactions reflected in the Cyprus records obscures the reasons that money flowed among the various parties, and it is possible they were characterized as loans for another purpose, like avoiding taxes that would otherwise be owed on income or equity investments.

One of the Manafort-related debts listed in the Cyprus records, totaling $7.8 million, was owed to Oguster Management Limited, a company in the British Virgin Islands connected to Mr. Deripaska. The debtor was a Cyprus company, LOAV Advisers, that the Deripaska court complaint says was set up by Mr. Manafort to make investments with Mr. Deripaska, a billionaire close to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. The loan is unsecured, bears 2 percent interest and has “no specified repayment date,” according to a financial statement for LOAV.

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LOAV Advisers, a Cyprus company linked to Mr. Manafort, reported a $7.8 million loan from an entity associated with Mr. Deripaska.
The other debt, for $9.9 million, was owed to Lucicle Consultants, a Cyprus company that appears to have ties to a Party of Regions parliamentarian, Ivan Fursin. Lucicle, whose precise ownership is unclear, is linked to Mr. Fursin through another offshore entity, Mistaro Ventures, which is registered in St. Kitts and Nevis and listed on a government financial disclosure form that Mr. Fursin filed in Ukraine. Mistaro transferred millions to Lucicle in February 2012 shortly before Lucicle made the $9.9 million loan to Jesand L.L.C., a Delaware company that Mr. Manafort previously used to buy real estate in New York. The loan to Jesand was unsecured, with a 3.5 percent interest rate, and payable on demand.

There is no indication from the financial statements that the loans had been repaid as of the time they were filed in December 2015. The statements contain a note saying that as of January 2014, the debts and assets for Lucicle and LOAV had been assigned to “a related party,” which is not identified. The records define related parties as entities that are under common control, suggesting that the assignment did not affect the ultimate debtors and creditors. The statements also said there had been no other changes after the financial reporting period covered by them, which was for the 2013 calendar year.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Deripaska declined to comment. Mr. Deripaska appears to have stopped pursuing his court action against Mr. Manafort and his former investment partners, Rick Gates and Rick Davis, in late 2015. In addition to the $19 million he said he had invested with Mr. Manafort, Mr. Deripaska claimed he paid Mr. Manafort an additional $7.3 million in management fees.

Photo

Ivan Fursin, a Party of Regions parliamentarian, appears to have ties to Lucicle Consultants. Credit UNIAN (Ukrainian Independent News and Information Agency)
Mr. Manafort has previously said that any payments he received for his Ukraine activities were aboveboard and made via wire transfers to an American bank. The Cyprus records suggest that at least some transactions originated with shell companies in tax havens like the Seychelles and the British Virgin Islands, and passed through financial institutions on Cyprus, including Hellenic Bank and Cyprus Popular Bank.

Mr. Manafort’s name does not show up in the Cyprus records. However, hints of his dealings in Ukraine appear throughout.

A 23-page financial statement for a Cyprus shell, Black Sea View Limited, lists transactions that include one with Pericles Capital Partners. Both Black Sea View and Pericles Capital are identified in court papers filed by Mr. Deripaska in the Cayman Islands as part of the corporate structure that Mr. Manafort put together to invest in a Ukrainian telecommunications business, Black Sea Cable. The same statement also reports what are described as $9.2 million in loans received in 2012 from four other entities, including one controlled by two Seychelles companies, Intrahold A.G. and Monohold A.G., which Ukrainian authorities have asserted were involved in the looting of public assets by allies of the Yanukovych government. The Black Sea Cable business was controlled at one point by Monohold and Intrahold.

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Similarly, Manafort-connected entities appear in the financial records for Lucicle Consultants, the Cyprus shell that received financing from a company associated with Mr. Fursin, the Party of Regions politician in Ukraine. Mr. Fursin did not respond to a request for comment. Lucicle received money from Black Sea View and PEM Advisers Limited, another firm identified in court papers as controlled by Mr. Manafort. It also made the $9.9 million loan to Jesand L.L.C.

Jesand L.L.C. appears to be a conflation of Jessica and Andrea, the names of Mr. Manafort’s two daughters. In hacked text messages belonging to Andrea Manafort that were posted last year on a website used by Ukrainian hackers, Jesand is mentioned in the context of financial dealings involving the Manaforts. Jesand was used by Mr. Manafort and his daughter Andrea in 2007 to buy a Manhattan condominium for $2.5 million.

The condo was one of several expensive pieces of real estate that Mr. Manafort bought, often with cash, during and after his time in Ukraine. He also invested millions with his son-in-law, Jeffrey Yohai, who set up a business to buy and redevelop luxury properties in the Los Angeles area. The business failed amid accusations of fraud by another former investor, who claimed Mr. Yohai had exploited his connection to Mr. Manafort to raise funds.

Last year, while trying to salvage his investments with Mr. Yohai, Mr. Manafort embarked on a borrowing spree in the United States, obtaining mortgages totaling more than $20 million on properties controlled by him and his wife. The F.B.I. and the New York attorney general’s office are investigating some of Mr. Manafort’s real estate dealings, including the loans he obtained last year.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/19/us/p ... trump.html


By BLAIR GUILD CBS NEWS July 18, 2017, 8:00 PM
Report: Ex-Trump campaign manager Manafort subpoenaed relating to loans

New York prosecutors have subpoenaed records relating to loans made to former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort by a bank owned by a Trump campaign adviser, a source familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal.

The Manhattan district attorney's office is demanding documents containing records of up $16 million in loans made by the Federal Savings Bank, a small bank where President Trump's former campaign adviser Steve Calk serves as Chairman and CEO.

Real estate records show the bank issued the loans for the two properties in New York and a condominium in Virginia. The WSJ's source said they were issued to Manafort and his wife.

White House tries to distance itself from former campaign chair with Russia ties
Play VIDEO
White House tries to distance itself from former campaign chair with Russia ties
Calk was a member of Mr. Trump's economic advisory panel, and was familiar with Manafort before both were associated with the Trump campaign. Around the time the loans were issued to Manafort, Calk had expressed interest in becoming Army Secretary, according to WSJ.

Prior to his role in the Trump campaign, Manafort spent years working as a political consultant for a pro-Russia group in Ukraine. In June, he retroactively registered as a foreign agent, saying his firm received more than $17 million from the Party of Regions, the former pro-Russian ruling party in Ukraine, for consulting work from 2012 through 2014.

Manafort is included in the group of Mr. Trump's associates being investigated in connection to Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election after it was discovered that he was present in a meeting held at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and a Kremlin-linked lawyer. Trump Jr. released a series of emails via Twitter last week, confirming that he was told the meeting would reveal allegedly damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of the Russian government's support of Mr. Trump.

Both Calk and a spokesman for Manafort declined to comment on the subject of the loans to the WSJ, although Calk had previously said the loans were standard and had sufficient collateral.

In May, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. and New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman began examining real estate transactions made by Manafort in search of money-laundering and fraud signs, according to the WSJ.

According to a federal report, Calk's bank's loans to Manafort equaled nearly 24 percent of the bank's $67 million of equity capital.

Schneiderman's office has also sought information regarding New York investment deals involving Manafort's son-in-law Jeffrey Yohai, which an FBI agent in the Los Angeles area has also requested, according to the WSJ.

The WSJ also reported in April that federal investigators requested Manafort's banking records from Citizens Financial Group Inc.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-ex-t ... -to-loans/
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Jul 20, 2017 8:29 am

Paul Dickinson‏
@prdickinson

Here's my litigator's take on letters sent by the Senate Judiciary today to Junior and Manafort basically asking for the same thing. 1/

These types of letters are called spoliation and/or preservation letters. Spoliation is a legal term to describe destroyed evidence. 2/

The letter is, for the most part, very broad and inclusive. It's much like what I would use in litigation as a document request. 3/

But it's sufficiently narrow in scope about Russia & contacts w/ Russian govt officials, associates, or reps to not go outside the lines. 4/

Item #1 seeks all docs related to the 6/9/16 meeting - including all docs provided during the meeting (what Jr. was given by Russians). 5/

Item #1 also seeks all docs re: scheduling the meeting. My thread on the email discussed the scheduling process. 6/

Based on experience (I'm a litigation atty), I often get into the details of things. It's what I do. I see ~50 Qs in Junior's one email. 1/

Item #1 also seeks all docs re: "what happened during the meeting & any related axns taken after the meeting." Pretty much covers it all. 7/

Item #1 asking for what happened during the meeting would cover all notes, texts (Manafort on phone), papers exchanged, etc. Everything. 8/

Item #1 asking for "any related axns taken after meeting" covers everything once they all left. Everything. Notes. Email. Texts. Etc. 9/

#1 asking for related axns could also be inferred to mean payments, receipts, setting up of secret email accts. It's an endless list. 10/

Item #2 then asks for all communications to/from/copied re: a long list of Russians & Trump's campaign folks. Jill Stein made the list. 11/

Item #2's list includes Flynn, Carter Page, Michael Cohen, Chris Steele, Corey L. and lots n lots of Russians. Even Putin's on the list! 12/

Item #2's list DOES NOT include Donald Trump, Sr. Thus avoids the call for Trump to object and bring his legal cnsl on POTUS privilege. 13/

Item #2's list ends to include all "alternative spellings, pseudonyms, nicknames, abbreviations, or codes." CODES NAMES! (Excellent) 14/

Item #2 is basically seeking any and every form of communication between Junior/Manafort and the folks listed about ANYTHING. 15/

This part of Item #2 may be overly broad. Hard to imagine how every communication between Junior and Lewandowski is relevant to Russia. 16/

Item #2's list of folks also excludes anyone currently in the WH. Jared Kushner is not on the list. Choice of names avoids involving WH. 17/

Item #3 then makes the big request. All docs relating to any attempt or axns to obtain info from Russia during the campaign about HRC. 18/

Item #3's request is to Junior, but includes all docs related to or axns taken by him - OR the Trump campaign. 19/

Junior could - and probably will - argue that he doesn't have custody or control over all of the requested docs. A reasonable argument. 20/

Manafort will def argue he has no custody or control over any such docs as he was fired by campaign. He'd only have pers docs. Still. 21/

Importantly, Item #3's request is for info from the Russian govt or "anyone who you believed to be acting on behalf of Russian govt". 22/

Item #4 then is the whale request: All docs re: axns taken by Trump campaign to use info related to Russia's meddling in election. 23/




https://twitter.com/prdickinson/status/ ... 0180052992

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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Jul 20, 2017 7:22 pm

Special counsel looking into possible money laundering by Manafort: report
BY MAX GREENWOOD - 07/20/17 06:27 PM EDT 492


Special counsel looking into possible money laundering by Manafort: report

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is looking into possible money laundering by President Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort as part of his investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 election, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

It's not the first time Manafort's dealings have come under scrutiny. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. are also looking into Manafort's real estate transactions for possible money laundering and fraud.

Mueller's investigation is focusing on Russian efforts to meddle in the 2016 election, as well as possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

The special counsel investigation is also looking into possible financial ties between members of the Trump campaign and Russian interests.

Mueller's review of Manafort's financial transactions has been in the works for several weeks, according to the Journal.

The Senate and House intelligence committees are also looking into Manafort's financial dealings as part of their investigations into Russian election meddling.

On Wednesday, The New York Times reported that Manafort owed as much as $17 million in debt to pro-Russia interests before signing on as President Trump's campaign manager in March of 2016. Manafort worked for Trump's campaign for free.

Manafort and Trump's eldest son Donald Trump Jr. have been called to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee next week, as part of that panel's own Russia investigation. The Senate Judiciary Committee is threatening to subpoena them if they do not come voluntarily.
http://thehill.com/policy/national-secu ... y-manafort


Senate Judiciary panel prepared to subpoena Manafort, Trump Jr., by Friday night

Donald Trump Jr. (left), and Paul Manafort (right) have been scheduled to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee the same week as the Senate Intelligence Committee plans to interview Jared Kushner (center). (Brian Snyder, Carlo Allegri/Reuters)
By Karoun Demirjian July 20 at 3:54 PM
The Senate Judiciary Committee has preapproved subpoenas to force former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. to appear before the panel if they do not accept by Friday evening an invitation to appear next week.

Committee chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said Thursday that Manafort, Trump Jr. and a third invited witness, Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson, have until Friday night to accept the invitation to testify in a public hearing scheduled for Wednesday. If they do not accept, Grassley said, subpoenas would be issued “almost immediately.”

“We’ve already authorized” the orders, Grassley said, explaining that the committee’s top Democrat, Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), had also signed off on the orders in advance. “She and I don’t have to take any action — it’s already been taken.”

A member of Manafort’s legal team said they are considering the Judiciary Committee request, understanding that they have until Friday afternoon to respond. Previously, a Manafort spokesman said the former Trump campaign chair was cooperating with the Senate and House Intelligence panels and had not decided which committee to respond to first. The lawyer for Trump Jr., Alan Futerfas, did not respond to requests for comment Thursday.

But on Wednesday night, a lawyer for Manafort indicated that his client was still trying to determine which congressional panel to appear before first. Trump Jr.’s lawyer, Alan Futerfas, did not respond to requests for comment about his client’s plans.

Grassley scheduled the two senior Trump campaign surrogates to appear before the panel the same week as the Senate Intelligence Committee plans to interview the president’s senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner. That interview is scheduled for Monday, according to Kushner’s lawyer — although on Thursday, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, Mark R. Warner (Va.), indicated the committee was also planning on a second audience with Kushner.

The Monday meeting is “just a staff interview,” Warner said, indicating he was not planning to attend because “I’m going to see him at another time.” Warner did not specify when.

Kushner, Manafort and Trump Jr. are all expected to be queried about their interactions with Russian nationals and, specifically, about their participation in a June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower that was pitched to Trump Jr. as an opportunity for a Kremlin-connected lawyer to offer the Trump campaign damaging information about Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

There were eight individuals present at the meeting, with the Russian side being represented by Natalia Veselnitskaya, a lawyer who had lobbied against the human rights sanctions bill known as the Magnitsky Act and its successor, the Global Magnitsky Act; Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-American lobbyist with experience serving in a Soviet military intelligence unit; Ike Kaveladze, a U.S.-based employee of a Russian real estate company who was once the subject of a congressional inquiry into money laundering; and a translator. Music producer Rob Goldstone, who had helped broker the meeting, was also present.


Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) said Wednesday that “all eight of those individuals will be important to us” and that “the committee’s going to reach out to everybody we feel has some contribution to make.”

Grassley has not indicated whether the Judiciary Committee plans to call as witnesses all of the others who were in that meeting. But Burr has scheduled Manafort and Trump Jr.’s testimony to occur concurrently with the testimony of two other witnesses: Simpson of Fusion GPS and William Browder, the chief executive of Hermitage Capital Management, which employed Sergei Magnitsky, the Russian after whom the bills Veselnitskaya has lobbied against were named.

Browder filed a complaint last year that Grassley has seized upon in recent months, alleging that Fusion GPS acted as an unregistered agent of the Russian government. Fusion is a research firm that is behind an unverified dossier detailing various salacious and otherwise compromising details of Trump’s activities in Russia. It once did research for the legal team representing the Russian company Prevezon in a civil court case; Prevezon is the company for which Veselnitskaya works.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpos ... 06c0997b2c




Report: Before joining Trump campaign, Manafort owed millions to pro-Russia interests
http://theweek.com/speedreads/713130/re ... -interests


and then he all of a sudden didn't owe any money to "pro" Russian interests :P
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jul 25, 2017 8:29 pm

Manafort heads for Senate showdown after subpoena
BY KATIE BO WILLIAMS - 07/25/17 05:57 PM EDT 21


© Greg Nash
The Senate Judiciary Committee has subpoenaed former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort to appear before the panel in an open hearing on Wednesday morning, setting up a high-stakes showdown with one of the central figures in the ongoing uproar over Trump and Russia.

The order was a dramatic reversal from just days before, when the committee said it had reached an agreement with Manafort and the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. that allowed them to skirt a subpoena in exchange for providing records and a private interview.

But Manafort’s deal appears to have broken down since Friday. If Manafort does not appear at the appointed time — 10 a.m. — on Wednesday morning, he risks being held in contempt of Congress.

According to committee leaders, Manafort was willing to do only one transcribed interview that only a handful of members of Congress would be able to see, effectively curtailing any opportunity that other committees would have to question him.
Even Judiciary committee members and staff would have been cut out under the terms Manafort’s lawyer proposed.

Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) refused to accept the deal.

“While the Judiciary Committee was willing to cooperate on equal terms with any other committee to accommodate Mr. Manafort’s request, ultimately that was not possible,” they wrote in a joint statement released Tuesday morning.

The committee may yet come to an eleventh-hour agreement with Manafort, although a spokesman for Feinstein said late in the afternoon Tuesday that he did not know of any ongoing talks. Grassley’s office did not respond when asked if negotiations were ongoing.

But the two lawmakers indicated in their statement that the door was still open.

“As with other witnesses, we may be willing to excuse him from Wednesday’s hearing if he would be willing to agree to production of documents and a transcribed interview, with the understanding that the interview would not constitute a waiver of his rights or prejudice the committee’s right to compel his testimony in the future,” they said.

At issue is a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Manafort, Trump Jr. and a woman described as a Russian government lawyer offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. An email setting up the meeting said the information was part of the Russian government’s effort to elect Trump.

Trump Jr. has said that the conversation centered on a push to rename, soften or repeal the Magnitsky Act, which imposed sanctions on some Russians for human rights violations. The lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, was then lobbying against those sanctions.

The meeting has drawn fierce congressional scrutiny from all sides.

On Tuesday morning, Manafort met behind closed doors with the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee “by previous agreement,” according to his spokesperson, where he “answered their questions fully.”

Manafort’s demands are smart lawyering, said Andy Wright, a former White House counsel and congressional lawyer on the House Oversight Committee — but it’s unlikely Grassley and Feinstein would ever agree to them given how many other committees are involved in the sweeping investigations into Trump and Russia, many of which implicate Manafort.

It would force even the Intelligence Committee — which has access to a broader swath of intelligence than Judiciary — to rely on the questions posed by a panel with completely different investigative and jurisdictional concerns.

The committee doesn’t have the authority to compel the written interview, only Manafort’s appearance or documents. When negotiations over access to the interview fell apart, the committee reverted to the best tool they do have: a subpoena requiring Manafort to testify publicly.

Manafort could appear before the committee on Wednesday morning and assert his constitutional right against self-incrimination.

But Wright says that Manafort may have effectively waived his Fifth Amendment rights by appearing before the Intelligence Committee.

“I would guess he would assert the Fifth at this point — but if he’s gone and given a big fat interview [to the intel panel] about a lot of the topics Judiciary wants to hear about, I don’t see how he’ll be able to say he didn’t waive his Fifth Amendment privileges,” Wright said.

If he fails to appear entirely, the Senate could vote to hold him in contempt and refer the matter for prosecution to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — although the chances are slim that the U.S. attorney would move forward with a prosecution.

There is a precedent for such a refusal. The Senate certified a criminal contempt charge against Attorney General Eric Holder during President Obama’s second term, but the U.S. attorney refused to bring it before the grand jury.

But Feinstein on Tuesday seemed to hint that such a maneuver would be unlikely.

“We can hold him in contempt and that’s a more complicated process. I hope that’s not the case,” she told CNN that afternoon.

Grassley has said that his interest in Manafort is related to enforcement of the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) under both the Trump and Obama administrations, one of the stated purposes of the hearing.

Investor Bill Browder, who worked to push the Magnitsky Act through Congress and is also scheduled to testify Wednesday, has filed a complaint with the Justice Department alleging Veselnitskaya and a handful of other Washington lawyers and lobbyists ran afoul of FARA by failing to register as foreign lobbyists.

Democrats, meanwhile, will likely be more interested in the Trump Tower meeting as evidence of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. The hearing is also billed as a probe of “attempts to influence U.S. elections.”

Manafort has long been a focal point in the speculation over Trump and Russia, due in part to his work for a Putin-backed campaign in Ukraine.

Committee leaders have waived a previously issued subpoena for another witness originally asked to testify on Wednesday, Glenn Simpson. Simpson, who heads a D.C.-based investigative firm that contracted the production of a dossier full of incendiary allegations about Trump, agreed to provide a transcribed interview in exchange for not testifying.

Although the committee has lifted the subpoena and Simpson will not be forced to testify, Grassley and Feinstein emphasized in a statement that the agreement “does not constitute a waiver of Mr. Simpson’s rights nor prejudice the committee’s right to compel his testimony in the future.”
http://thehill.com/policy/national-secu ... r-subpoena



From Russia with Love
PAUL MANAFORT REPORTEDLY OWED MILLIONS TO RUSSIAN OLIGARCH BEFORE JOINING TRUMP CAMPAIGN
A new report sheds new light on the former campaign chairman’s work as a lobbyist for a pro-Kremlin political party in Ukraine.

BY ABIGAIL TRACY
JULY 20, 2017 10:44 AM

Paul Manafort speaks with the press during an election event in New York, April 19, 2016.
By Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg/Getty Images.
Before joining Donald Trump last March as an unpaid campaign manager, Paul Manafort reportedly owed as much as $17 million to companies controlled by a Russian oligarch and a Ukrainian businessman with political ties to Moscow. According to financial records filed with the government of Cyprus and reviewed by The New York Times shell companies linked to Manafort and his business activities were millions of dollars in debt while the longtime Washington lobbyist was working as a political consultant for the pro-Kremlin Party of Regions in Ukraine. Most notably, Manafort—who retroactively registered as a foreign agent last month for his lobbying work—owed $7.8 million to a company connected to Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch with close ties to Vladimir Putin. Manafort also owed a separate sum of $9.9 million to a Cyprus company linked to Ivan Fursin, a Party of Regions member of the Ukrainian Parliament, through a Delaware-based LLC that he previously used to purchase real estate in New York City, the Times reports.

The Cyprus records provide a window into Manafort’s murky financial dealings in Ukraine and Russia, which has long been the subject of scrutiny amid the ongoing probes into whether the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russian government in the 2016 election. In August of last year, Manafort’s name reportedly surfaced on a handwritten ledger that showed he was designated to receive $12.7 million in undisclosed payments from the Party of Regions—a revelation that thrust a spotlight on Manafort’s previous business transactions and ultimately led to his resignation as Trump’s campaign chairman. (On Monday, Ukrainian prosecutors said they haven’t found any proof of illegal payments to Manafort.) And last month, the Associated Press reported that Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed to lead the Justice Department investigation into Russia’s election meddling, is investigating Manafort’s past work in Ukraine.

A spokesperson for Manafort flatly rejected the suggestion that there was any connection between Manafort’s past debts and his work for Donald Trump. “Manafort is not indebted to Mr. Deripaska or the Party of Regions, nor was he at the time he began working for the Trump campaign,” Jason Maloni told the Times. “The broader point, which Mr. Manafort has maintained from the beginning, is that he did not collude with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election.”

Maloni later sent an e-mail to The New York Times demanding that the paper retract its report, arguing that the Times had “offered no evidence that these transactions represent current obligations” and noting that the LLC documents “do not show these are personal or current obligations.” The e-mail, which Maloni shared with the Hive, alleges that the Times acted irresponsibly by using “unproven allegations from a counter party in litigation as actual evidence of a debt.” (A spokesperson for the Times said they have carefully reviewed the request and see no basis for a correction.)

Still, the latest news about Manafort comes at a poor time for White House, which has been embroiled in controversy over the revelation that members of the Trump campaign—including Manafort—met with a Russian lawyer last summer in hopes of securing damaging information about Hillary Clinton. According to a series of e-mails released last week by Donald Trump Jr., an intermediary had promised the “high level and sensitive information” as “part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump.” The subsequent meeting, to which Trump Jr. eagerly agreed, was also attended by Manafort and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as well as an alleged ex-Soviet spy turned Russian-American lobbyist and two Russian translators—one of whom, Irakly “Ike” Kaveladze, had once been accused by congressional investigators of participating in a $1.4 billion money laundering scheme to funnel money from Eastern Europe through U.S. banks. (Kaveladze has denied any wrongdoing.) Both Manafort and Kushner were copied on the e-mail exchange setting up the meeting.
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/ ... p-campaign
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jul 26, 2017 8:04 pm

NEWS JUL 26 2017, 3:21 PM ET
DOJ: Ex-Manafort Associate Firtash Is Top-Tier Comrade of Russian Mobsters
by TOM WINTER

The Department of Justice has identified a former business associate of ex-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort as an "upper-echelon [associate] of Russian organized crime."

The declaration came in a 115-page filing as part of the government's case against Dmytro Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch who was once involved in a failed multimillion-dollar deal to buy New York's Drake Hotel with Manafort, and an important player in the Ukrainian political party for which Manafort worked.

Firtash is being prosecuted for what federal prosecutors in Chicago say was his role in bribing Indian officials in order to get a lucrative mining deal to sell titanium to Boeing.

Dmytro Firtash
Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash waits for the start of his trial at the main court in Vienna, Austria, April 30, 2015. Ronald Zak / AP file
Related: Donald Trump Aide Paul Manafort Scrutinized for Russian Business Ties

The government says that prosecuting Firtash and his co-defendant in the alleged scheme, Andras Knopp, "will disrupt this organized crime group and prevent it from further criminal acts within the United States."

In 2008, according to court records, Manafort's firm was involved with Firtash in a plan to redevelop the Drake Hotel for $850 million. Firtash's company planned to invest more than $100 million, the records say.

One of the other partners working with Manafort on the deal was the former exclusive broker for Fred Trump's properties, Brad Zackson. Fred Trump is the now-deceased father of Donald Trump.

Eventually, documents show, Firtash's investment company transferred $25 million into escrow to further the project.

Also in 2008, according to a State Department cable posted by WikiLeaks, Firtash told U.S. Ambassador William Taylor that he got his start in business with the permission of one of Russia's most well-known organized crime bosses, Semion Mogilevich. But Firtash claimed to Taylor that he was forced to deal with such people.

Related: What Did Ex-Trump Aide Paul Manafort Really Do in Ukraine?

Firtash was a major backer of Ukraine's Party of Regions, the pro-Russian party for which Manafort worked for many years, according to the federal criminal complaint and another leaked State cable. Manafort's firm made more than $17 million in gross revenue from the party in just two years, according to his recent Foreign Agent Registration Act filing. Another leaked cable said that Manafort's job in 2006 was to give the Party of Regions an "extreme makeover" and "change its image from … a haven for mobsters into that of a legitimate political party."

In interviews and statements to NBC News, Manafort has said he "never had a business relationship" with Firtash. "There was one occasion where an opportunity was explored. ... Nothing transpired and no business relationship was ever implemented."

The government's 115-page filing came in response to a motion to dismiss by Firtash's lawyers, who say the government has failed to establish that any crime occurred in the U.S.

In a statement to NBC News, Firtash attorney Dan Webb said the government filing makes two accusations that are not part of the federal indictment — that Firtash is connected to Russian organized crime, and that he made bribe payments intended for individuals in the U.S. Webb said there is "no evidence" that Firtash is linked to organized crime, and the accusation that he made bribe payments "is also false, and that is why the government did not include it as well in its own indictment."

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Illinois did not respond to a request for comment.


Married to the Ukrainian Mob

Meet Dmytro Firtash, the shady billionaire at the heart of Russia’s energy stranglehold over Kiev.
3 YEARS AGO
CATEGORIES: COLUMN
Michael Weiss
Featured image

Buried in the news of Russia’s invasion, and now annexation, of the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea was the second most important event to affect the new Ukrainian government last week — and it happened in Austria. On the evening of March 12, one of the most notorious Ukrainian oligarchs, Dmytro Firtash, whose fortune has been estimated at anywhere from $673 million to the tens of billions, was arrested in Vienna, right outside of one of his offices in the Margareten district. Neither he nor his bodyguards put up a struggle, according to press reports, although Group DF, the massive international holding company Firtash owns, has said in a statement that the whole thing was a "misunderstanding" which would be "resolved in the very near term."

But the misunderstanding involved agents from Austria’s organized crime division and its elite counterterrorism special ops unit, which doesn’t bear the hallmarks of a short-term mix-up, even by European standards. Austrian authorities have said that Firtash was detained on suspicions of bribery and forming a criminal organization related to overseas business deals. On March 18, the oligarch himself claimed that his arrest was "without foundation" and that he believes "strongly that the motivation was purely political." Bail has been set at a record-breaking $174 million, which the Vienna criminal court expects Firtash to post shortly, though he won’t be able to leave Austria.

Relations between Washington and Moscow have deteriorated precipitously since November, when then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych backed out of an E.U. association agreement that he’d spent years lobbying for and opted for a $15 billion bribe from President Vladimir Putin instead. Now, almost a month after Yanukovych’s night-flight from Kiev and his formal ouster from power by the Ukrainian Rada, and three weeks after Russian forces invaded and occupied Crimea, the West has groped to find ways to punish politically keyed-in moneymen, from Moscow to Kiev. For the better part of a decade, Firtash wasn’t just one of Ukraine’s richest oligarchs, he was the principal conduit for the astonishingly profitable and legendarily crooked gas trade between Russia and Ukraine.

According to the New York Times, Firtash, who has stakes in the energy, media, real estate, banking, and chemical industries, was detained on bribery and other as-yet-unspecified charges at the request of the FBI, which had been investigating the Ukrainian business mogul since 2006. Eight years is certainly a long time to wait. And while it is true that Firtash had so far avoided landing himself on the European Union’s list of 18 sanctioned Ukrainians — most of them former officials in the Yanukovych government, as well as their relatives — few who are familiar with his background or are now closely monitoring an increasingly assertive U.S.-EU effort to counter Russian aggression believe that this high-profile collaring simply occurred out of the blue.

Firtash is simply too good of a political target and the timing, too suspicious. According to Standard Bank analyst Timothy Ash, Firtash "has close ties to Russia via the energy sector, and perhaps even to [President Vladimir] Putin." One of the oligarch’s chemical companies, Ash notes, got large discounts from Gazprom, Russia’s state-controlled gas giant, at a time when Naftohaz, Ukraine’s state gas company, was paying premium prices for imports. The ownership of the Swiss-registered gas trading company RosUkrEnergo is also almost evenly divided between Firtash and Gazprom, indicating that the Ukrainian oligarch was a close partner of the Kremlin.

"The arrest is not a coincidence," former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor, told Foreign Policy. "I suspect there are many Ukrainian businesspeople who are very nervous at this point. The United States has put sanctions and visa bans on a few individuals, and Firtash would be a leading candidate. He clearly supported President Yanukovych." The timing of the arrest might have been opportunistic, but the investigations of criminal activity were very real — and U.S. law enforcement agencies had been closing in for some time. Indeed, Taylor said he suspected that the Austrian operation had something to do with longstanding allegations that Firtash is tied to organized crime in the United States and Europe.

One degree of separation from the FBI’s "10 Most Wanted"

As it happens, Firtash has admitted to his mob connections — to Taylor, in fact. In December 2008, the Ukrainian personally requested a meeting with the ambassador to make "his case to the [U.S. government]." A State Department cable, subsequently published by WikiLeaks, stated: "Firtash’s bottom line was that he did not deny having links to those associated with organized crime. Instead, he argued that he was forced into dealing with organized crime members including [Semion] Mogilevich or he would never have been able to build a business."

The Ukrainian-born Mogilevich, thought to be more powerful than John Gotti or Whitey Bulger ever were, is currently on the FBI’s "10 Most Wanted" list. He was indicted by the U.S. Justice Department in 2003 on 45 counts of mail fraud, wire fraud, securities fraud, money-laundering, and racketeering related to a multinational, publicly traded front company called YBM Magnex, Inc, which at its height was valued at $150 million. It claimed to manufacture magnets — except that it didn’t. Instead, YBM Magnex drove its share prices up on the Toronto Stock Exchange by convincing shareholders that the money Mogilevech and his conspirators were moving around banks globally was for the purchases of raw materials. But the end product never existed. In 2009, FBI agent Peter Kowenhoven told CNN that Mogilevich "has access to so much, including funding, including other criminal organizations, that he can, with a telephone call and order, affect the global economy."

The Mogilevich Organization, as the FBI refers to his criminal empire, keeps an especially diverse portfolio: In addition to murder, prostitution, money-laundering, and precious gems dealing, it also traffics in both weapons and nuclear materials. Based in Budapest, the syndicate has branches in Prague, Vienna, Moscow, Israel, France, and Slovakia. In fact, Mogilevich was himself briefly arrested in Moscow in 2008 on tax fraud charges, but was soon released on bail. Ignoring numerous U.S. extradition requests, the Kremlin now allows Mogilevich to reside comfortably on Russian soil, which may be still another reason that Firtash was grabbed while in Austria, which, unlike Russia, has an extradition treaty with the United States. (The FBI has said it hopes Mogilevich travels abroad so that it can have him arrested, too.)

There are plenty of third parties linked to both Mogilevich and Firtash, and even one company where both men were directors at the same time. They also shared the same Israeli attorney, Zeev Gordon. In 2006, Gordon admitted to the London-based corruption watchdog Global Witness that he had acted as a trustee in 2002, when Firtash set up Eural Trans Gas (ETG), a powerful gas trading company and joint venture between Naftohaz and Gazprom. A day after ETG was born, on Dec. 5, 2002, it won a contract to transport gas from Turkmenistan to Ukraine in exchange for gas worth as much as $1 billion on European markets. Not bad for a company founded in a Hungarian village with $12,000 in startup capital.

ETG has extraordinarily opaque origins. Gordon, for instance, was one of four original shareholders in the company. The other three were, as the watchdog Global Witness put it, "three hard-up Romanians with no connection to the gas industry, one of whom was an out-of-work actress who says she took part in order to pay her phone bill." The Israeli lawyer further claimed that Firtash’s role in ETG was as a strictly private investor, not as an agent of either Gazprom or the Ukrainian government, then headed by President Leonid Kuchma. Yet a decade ago, Firtash was a relatively unknown and smalltime businessman. Even in 2006, Global Witness could not account for why someone whose photograph was not yet publicly available was authorized to control such a lucrative enterprise with the blessings of both Kiev and Moscow, especially when the creation of a state-owned gas transport vehicle would have been the more logical joint venture between the two governments. To this day, no one can say with complete certainty how Firtash landed himself in such an elite position, or on whose behalf he was actually acting.

Humble origins

Dmytro Firtash’s own history is bathed in as much opacity as his many professional transactions. Much of what is known about him comes from what he himself has told interlocutors over the years, including Taylor, the former U.S. ambassador, who remains skeptical of many of the oligarch’s claims. Other sources include the Ukrainian newspaper Ukrainska Pravda, which reported that Firtash, although not terribly well-educated, was highly decorated as a soldier in the Ukrainian Army and, like many future oligarchs from the former Soviet Union, parlayed his Communist connections into capitalist riches.

Following Ukraine’s independence in 1991, Firtash started a business in Chernivtsi, western Ukraine, which delivered canned goods and dry milk to Uzbekistan. His first company, KMIL, which he co-owned with his first wife, Martiya Kalinvoska, is said to have incurred heavy losses toward the end of the 1990s. KMIL then involved itself in more profitable food-for-gas barter schemes with Turkmenistan, benefitting from Ukraine’s inability to buy gas imports with its diminished foreign exchange reserves. KMIL was eventually rolled into a preexisting Cyprus-registered entity called Highrock Holding, of which Firtash became the director in 2001. According to Ukrainian press reports, also cited in Taylor’s 2008 cable to Washington, Highrock’s financial director in the late 1990s was a man named Igor Fisherman — none other than the future president of YBM Magnex, Inc., the fake magnets manufacturer that defrauded U.S. and Canadian investors and made Mogilevich one of America’s top fugitives. (Fisherman was indicted by the Justice Department in that case, too.)

According to the FBI’s 1996 file on the Mogilevich Organization, Fisherman worked out of the Newtown, Pennsylvania, headquarters of YBM Magnex and acted as the coordinator of the kingpin’s "contacts and criminal activities in the Ukraine, Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, and Hungary."

Highrock’s connection to the Mogilevich Organization was clearly more than just tangential. In yet another U.S. State Department cable from Kiev, this one dated November 2008, William Klein, the acting economic counselor in the U.S. embassy, noted that "34 percent of Highrock was owned by a firm called Agatheas Trading Ltd," which Galina Telesh, Mogilevich’s ex-wife, reportedly directed from 2001 to 2003. The cable also noted that Firtash and his wife owned 33 percent of Highrock, and that the Ukrainian oligarch became the director of Agatheas Trading in 2003.

Firtash himself confirmed this ownership breakdown of Highrock to the Financial Times in 2006, although he denied that he had ever met or dealt with Telesh directly, insisting that another man — his alleged partner in the Cypriot company — was Telesh’s point-person. That man was Igor Makarov, the founder and president of Itera, the company that preceded ETG as the preferred intermediary in the Russian-Ukrainian gas trade.

By 2000, Makarov had grown Itera into the fourth-largest gas company in the world, thanks to its enormous reserves. In conversation with Taylor, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Firtash claimed he used Highrock to transfer food commodities to Itera, which were then used to purchase gas in kind from Turkmenistan — until they fell out in 2001 over Makarov’s alleged failure to pay Firtash the $50 million he was owed in gas proceeds. It was then, according to Taylor, that Firtash decided to embark on his own independent career and unseat Makarov as Ukraine’s top gas importer. He even told the U.S. ambassador about a Sopranos-style sit-down dinner he attended with Makarov in 2002. Mogilevich, he said, was present as Makarov’s bodyguard — and Firtash wasn’t sure he’d get through the meal alive.

To ensure his position as Ukraine’s most powerful gas titan, Firtash appointed former Hungarian Culture Minister Andreas Knopp as managing director of ETG. Knopp was a man he believed could facilitate deals with Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan — and it was Knopp who ended up signing all the contracts between Naftohaz and Gazprom. But it was also Knopp who brought the budding oligarch once more into the orbit of the mob boss Firtash says he could never have avoided. Knopp is mentioned in a 2005 Austrian Federal Criminal Investigation Agency report on the Mogilevich Organization, which Foreign Policy has obtained. The report states that Knopp was suspected by the FBI of being "a long-standing member of the [organization] and has been frequently involved in [its] operations."

The monopoly man

Firtash’s biggest break came on July 22, 2004, with the birth of RosUkrEnergo (RUE) in Zug, Switzerland. The registration of this company seems hardly a coincidence, as it occurred exactly four days before a meeting in Yalta between Vladimir Putin, then just finishing his first term as president, and Leonid Kuchma, who was just months away from the Orange Revolution that would prevent his chosen successor and then-prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, from stealing a national election. The purpose of the meeting was to broker a new agreement between Naftohaz and Gazprom, and its principal yield was the establishment of a joint venture between Russia and Ukraine that would control the flow of gas from the former into the latter, and then into the rest of the European Union. RUE, as it would be known, was therefore put in charge of ensuring that approximately 50 million people on the continent had access to energy. Yet there was something odd about the ownership structure of this bilateral proposal.

While the Russian half of the joint venture was clearly owned by the Kremlin, no one quite seemed to know who the ultimate legal beneficiaries on the Ukrainian side were, other than that they were an obscure consortium of Ukrainian businessmen. The interests of the Ukrainian shareholders were managed by CentraGas Holding, a wholly owned subsidiary of Raisffeisen Zentralbank, the third-largest bank in Austria. But who were these lucky private investors? "I don’t know any more than you do and Gazprom does not know either," Putin told a Spanish journalist in 2006. "It was they [the Ukrainians] who proposed that RosUkrEnergo supply gas to Ukraine instead of Gazprom. We agreed."

It is, of course, highly unlikely that the Russian president was unaware of the identity of half of the shareholders of a gas transport monopoly which, at its height, made close to $800 million a year. But it was not until 2006 that Firtash disclosed his co-ownership of RUE alongside Gazprom. This may have been at least partly the result of a criminal investigation into both RUE and ETG, opened in June 2005 by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), then headed by Oleksandr Turchynov, a loyalist of Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Recently released from prison following the Euromaidan protests and Yanukovych’s ouster last month, Tymoshenko has been repeatedly blamed by Firtash for not only sabotaging his commercial interests in Ukraine but for caving to Moscow. As the Ukrainian oligarch told Taylor in 2008, Tymoshenko was planning to "offer up the country to Russia on a silver platter."

Tymoshenko, who has not escaped corruption allegations herself, once referred to RUE as a "wart on the body of the Naftohaz company" on Ukrainian television. In 2005, SBU head Turchynov told the Financial Times that he suspected the real person behind RUE was not an oligarch, but Ukraine’s most notorious mob boss: "The surname Mogilevich isn’t in the [gas trade] agreements or in the ownership documents," he said, "but there are many indications that a group of people under his control could be involved."

There were other eyebrow-raising aspects to RUE’s governance. Its two co-directors were Konstantin Chuychenko and Oleg Palchykov. Chuychenko was an ex-KGB agent who ran Gazprom’s legal department and maintained close ties to Dmitry Medvedev, who was co-chairman of the board of Gazprom and later tapped by Putin to be a placeholder president of Russia. Palchykov, meanwhile, was the former head of ETG’s Moscow office and yet another link in the chain between Firtash and Mogilevich. As the late Jamestown Foundation scholar Roman Kupchinsky wrote in 2009, the address given for the ETG’s Moscow office was the same building where the mobster’s alleged right-hand man and former Highrock Holding financial director, Igor Fisherman, worked.

In September 2005, Tymoshenko was sacked, along with the rest of her cabinet, by President Viktor Yushchenko — her Orange Revolution ally turned political rival. As a result, Turchynov resigned from the SBU and was replaced by a former assistant who later denied that any investigation into Firtash’s ventures had ever taken place. Turchynov later told Global Witness that he had informed Yushchenko — a man whom Firtash called a friend and confidant — that RUE posed a serious danger to Ukraine’s energy security. These warnings went unheeded at the time, but when Tymoshenko was again appointed prime minister in 2007, Firtash seems to think she resumed her effort to dismantle his energy empire.

Firtash may have been right about that. From 2005 to 2006, Russia waged its first so-called "gas war" with Ukraine — a war seemingly settled on Jan. 4, 2006, when it was decided that Turkmenistan would sell RUE gas for an undisclosed but incredibly cheap price, while Gazprom would sell RUE Russian gas at $230 per 1,000 cubic meters. Ukraine would then pay $95 per 1,000 cubic meters for its imports, while also receiving a 47 percent boost in profits for transporting Russian gas to the European market. One investment analyst told the BBC at the time that the deal was "designed so that both sides can say they’re paying — and being paid — the price they wanted."

Firtash falls out

In order to undercut critics of the Russian side, who (rightly) alleged that this compromise was no less transparent than previous Russian-Ukrainian gas deals, Firtash’s ownership of RUE was outed — itself in the shadiest manner. A journalist named Vladimir Berezhnoi, writing in the then-Gazprom-owned Russian newspaper Izvestia, said that Firtash controlled 45 percent of RUE through CentraGas Holding. The article also claimed that Mogilevich was the owner of Highrock Holding, the company of which Firtash was then a director. The only problem? Inquiries made by the St. Petersburg Times revealed that "Vladimir Berezhnoi" was a concoction — the actual article had been written under a pseudonym by an Izvestia staff writer after a Gazprom representative had turned over an audit proving Firtash’s ownership.

In any event, the new Moscow-Kiev arrangement didn’t last long. In 2009, RUE lost its role as the exclusive importer of Gazprom gas as part of an agreement which Putin and Yushchenko struck to resolve yet another Russian-Ukrainian gas war. Firtash blamed Tymoshenko for eliminating RUE’s import monopoly, and there was evidence that Putin had cast his lot with the blonde-tressed Orange Revolutionary. "From our side, RosUkrEnergo is 50 percent-owned directly by Gazprom, but from the Ukrainian side, there are some individuals," Putin said in January 2009. "We don’t know them. But they again are showing us this Mr Firtash, with whom I have never met, never seen with my own eyes." As for whom Firtash worked, Putin demurred: "Don’t ask us." It was a sign that the Ukrainian oligarch had lost his patron in the Kremlin.

But by this point, Firtash had already begun expanding beyond the energy sector and into other enterprises. He announced plans to acquire Ukraine’s Nadra Bank in 2008-2009, around the time that it was headed into default, and closed the deal in 2011. In 2013, he purchased 100 percent of Inter Media Group back from former co-owner Valery Khoroshkovsky, who had bought out Firtash’s stake in the conglomerate in 2007. Through Inter Media Group, Firtash now owns seven television channels including K1, K2, and Megasport, plus the influential Kiev-based Ukrainian News Agency, outlets that were accused by Euromaidan activists of either censoring material or nakedly siding with Yanukovych’s crackdown.

In 2012, Interfax reported that Firtash planned to team up with another powerful and politically influential billionaire, Arkady Rotenberg, Putin’s childhood friend and judo partner. The two were said to be looking to build one of Russia’s largest chemical plants in Russia’s far east. But the Ukrainian was also looking to the West. In particular, he cultivated a special fondness for Britain.

The British connection

One man in particular has played a key role in endearing him to the London establishment: Robert Shetler-Jones, a British businessman who was one of three members of the coordination committee charged with making major decisions during the first year of RUE’s existence. (The other two members were Yuri Boiko, then the controversial chairman of Naftohaz, and Ilhor Voronin, Boiko’s deputy.)

Shetler-Jones has been indirectly tied to two Cypriot-registered companies, Dema Nominees and Dema Trustees, which by 2004 had assumed the controlling stake in ETG. One of these companies’ subsidiaries, Denby Holdings, also registered in Cyprus, listed Shetler-Jones as a director and operated out of the same office in central London as a company called Belgravia Business Services, an address at which Shetler-Jones also worked. In February 2004 — around six months before the Putin-Kuchma summit that established RUE’s monopoly on Russian gas imports — Shetler-Jones’s Hamburg-based company, RSJ Erste, purchased 89 percent of the shares in Kyrmsoda, Ukraine’s largest industrial soda manufacturer. The year 2004 was quite the annus mirabilis for the Briton, whose ties to Firtash seemed inexhaustible.

Take ACI Trading Ltd, a chemical trading company, owned by Dema Nominees and Dema Trustees, the parent companies of ETG. One of ACI Trading’s clients was Kyrmsoda. In 2004, Kuchma, the Ukrainian president, also enlisted RSJ Erste as a partner in a Ukrainian state property fund that included Crimean Titan, "one of Europe’s largest titanium dioxide producers that has distributors throughout the world, including Iran, Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and the U.S.," to quote William Klein’s State Department cable, which also established that Crimean Titan was nearly half-owned by a subsidiary of Firtash’s Group DF.

In 2005, Shetler-Jones coyly explained to the Kyiv Post, "I have met Mr. Firtash on several occasions and we are acquainted," although he denied that Firtash held any stake in RSJ Erste. As to where, exactly, Shetler-Jones found the requisite startup capital to invest in so many profit-making and politically-connected continental enterprises, the Briton was cagey, telling the Kyiv Post that his funding came from "various European sources." Acquaintanceship only blossomed into direct financial kinship after Shetler-Jones went on to serve as the inaugural CEO of Group DF, from 2007 to 2012, and is now a member of the company’s supervisory council. Shetler-Jones has given tens of thousands of pounds via his own company Scythian Ltd. to the British Conservative Party, as the Independent newspaper reported last week, following Firtash’s arrest. Scythian Ltd. is described on the Group DF website as "a consultancy advising businesses on structuring of corporate acquisitions in the Former Soviet Union."

Shetler-Jones is quite clearly Firtash’s man in London. He’s currently the director of the British Ukrainian Society (BUS), which, according to its own website, "seeks to raise the profile of Ukraine in Great Britain and strengthen relations at all levels between the United Kingdom and Ukraine." The BUS has "received secretarial support from Group DF," according to the Independent, which certainly makes sense given that both the not-for-profit and the for-profit share the same office bloc in the tony Knightsbridge area of central London.

The chairman of BUS, meanwhile, is a British peer, Lord Risby; another director of the organization is Tory MP John Whittingdale, formerly also the "honorary vice president" of Conservative Friends of Russia, which was shuttered in disgrace in 2012 owing to its close ties to the Russian embassy in London and its transparently pro-Putin leanings. (It has since been reconstituted as the Westminster Russia Forum.) Whittingdale has apparently taken several trips to Ukraine in the past few years, all paid for by BUS. He claims to have met both with Yanukovych’s people and the opposition, and to have never received "any instruction" from Firtash as to what politics to espouse, though this probably was not necessary as Whittingdale is an open admirer of former Chilean strongman Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

Like many post-Soviet industrialists, Firtash owns property in London, including a mansion near the department store Harrods, complete with an underground swimming pool. He’s also gotten into charity and cultural works. His second wife Lada helps to run the Firtash Foundation, a registered British charity, which in 2012 gave $400,000 to the Ukrainian Catholic University to cover costs for a $12 million campus renovation project, and about $166,000 to the Cambridge Foundation, the fundraising arm of Cambridge University. The money, according to the Firtash Foundation’s Charity Commission filings, went to "the development of academic ideas in order to bring products to market" — whatever that means.

The Firtash Foundation is located in the same Knightsbridge office block as BUS and Group DF. In October, both it and Group DF funded "Days of Ukraine," a lavish cultural event in London launched in the House of Commons, attended by both Speaker of the House John Bercow and now former Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister Kostyantyn Gryshchenko. According to its own press materials, Days of Ukraine "received support at the highest level, including the patronage of President Viktor Yanukovych." For helping to organize this festival, Firtash was given the privilege of opening the London Stock Exchange.

The Magnitsky link

Since Putin invaded Crimea, and since Washington and Brussels have mulled ways to hit back at Moscow using "banks, not tanks," the ways in which state-indulged, if not state-sponsored, oligarchs from the East found their way into Western capitals and financial markets have come under more intense scrutiny. Non-transparency and plausible deniability are the principal rules of their economic activity, which is why these oligarchs almost never register their holdings in the West (they just spend their money there), but rather in few-questions-asked offshore jurisdictions. An excellent and in-depth investigation was published in April 2013 by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), showing how a firm called Commonwealth Trust Limited, based in the British Virgin Islands — a jurisdiction known for its respect for corporate privacy and high tolerance for money-laundering — "served as a middleman for an extensive list of shady operators — setting up offshore companies for securities swindlers, Ponzi schemers and individuals linked to political corruption, arms trafficking and organized crime."

One of Commonwealth Trust’s clients was Dmytro Firtash, who registered Group DF in the British Virgin Islands in 2006. Other clients included a handful of shadowy intermediaries for men and women employed by both the Russian government and a major Russian organized crime syndicate known as the Klyuev Group. These intermediaries, ICIJ learned, set up at least 23 offshore companies that were used to transfer money and obscure the origin of a $230 million tax fraud perpetrated by the Klyuev Group on Christmas Eve, 2007.

That theft was uncovered and outlined in painstaking detail in 2008 by Sergei Magnitsky, a Moscow-based tax attorney, who was subsequently arrested for the crime himself by the very Interior Ministry policemen he had identified as conspirators. Magnitsky was tortured and killed in prison in 2009, and his corpse was put on trial in Russia last year, not so much to prove his guilt (which not even the prosecutors or judge in the case really believed) but to exonerate the Klyuev Group, several government agents of which were awarded promotions or state honors following what became known in Russia as the "Magnitsky affair."

A U.S. law was passed in 2012, named for Magnitsky and designed as a handy way to freeze the American assets of Russian officials credibly accused of gross human rights abuses. The European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee has on March 18 suggested that 32 names — most of them members or affiliates of the Klyuev Group — be sanctioned by the European Union. Washington and Brussels have finally awakened to the fact that money pouring into the West from the East isn’t just dirty. More often than not, it’s blood-soaked.

In 2010, Spanish magistrate Jose Grinda Gonzalez, an expert on organized crime, labeled Russia a "virtual mafia state," adding that Belarus, Chechnya, and Ukraine qualified for this dubious distinction as well.

And herein lies the significance of Dmytro Firtash’s arrest — the rush of anxiety and trepidation it has no doubt precipitated across those countries Putin wants to enlist in his protectionist Eurasian Union. Another revolution, one waged in protest of that neo-Soviet project, has just toppled a government in Kiev, of which Firtash was a major beneficiary. Now the oligarch is in the clink in Vienna and may soon be placed aboard a plane to the United States, where prosecutors and judges aren’t so easily bought and where tolerance for billionaires with dodgy dealings with the Putin and Yanukovych regimes are at all-time lows. Firtash lost his patrons in Moscow in 2009 and his patrons in Kiev three weeks ago. No wonder the law finally caught up with him.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/03/19/mar ... n-mob/amp/



Rovt is a Ukrainian émigré to the U.S. who earned more than $1 billion selling fertilizer in Ukraine and buying real estate in New York. In 2011, he sold all his overseas interests to Dmytro Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch who had been Manafort's business partner in a failed $850 million hotel redevelopment deal.

Firtash is under U.S. indictment in an unrelated case and facing extradition from Vienna, Austria.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/man ... ax-n759866


In 2008, Firtash and Manafort were reported to have had plans together to invest $900 million into revamping New York City’s Drake Hotel that never came to fruition. It has been alleged that the entire deal was conceived as a way for Dmitry Firtash to “park his ill-gotten billions that he had siphoned out of Ukraine.”




Austria grants US request to extradite Ukrainian mogul Dmytro Firtash
Vienna court overturns previous decision to reject extradition on grounds it was politically motivated

Reuters and Associated Press in Vienna

Tuesday 21 February 2017 08.55 EST First published on Tuesday 21 February 2017 08.44 EST
An Austrian court has granted a US request to extradite Ukrainian mogul Dmytro Firtash over bribery allegations.

On Tuesday, the court in Vienna overturned a previous Austrian court decision to reject the extradition request on the grounds that it was politically motivated.

“The [appeal against the previous decision] has been granted,” the judge told the court, which was packed with journalists and Firtash’s family. “This does not mean that somebody is being pre-judged as guilty, but rather that it will be decided in another country whether they are guilty or innocent.”

Firtash is a former supporter of Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Moscow Ukrainian president who was ousted in 2014. The mogul, who made a fortune selling Russian gas to the Ukrainian government, denies the US allegations.

He was indicted in Chicago by a US grand jury in 2012 for allegedly paying millions of dollars in bribes to Indian officials through US banks in a failed attempt to secure titanium mining rights in India.

Arrested a year later in Vienna, Firtash posted bail of €125m (more than £106m) shortly afterwards, leaving him free but unable to leave Austria.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... ro-firtash


Will Trump Rescue the Oligarch in the Gilded Cage?
Dmitry Firtash’s extradition case will test the administration’s intentions toward Russia. Flynn’s ouster just complicated it.
by Robert Kolker
February 15, 2017, 11:01 PM CST
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The oligarch is hungry. So Dmitry Firtash crams into a small elevator with his entourage. Slowly, they rise to the private rooftop level of Do & Co, a modernist hotel in the otherwise Old World tourist heart of Vienna. The doors open into a tiny, glass-walled private dining room that seems like a long catwalk suspended in air, affording the oligarch a 360-degree view of the European capital he’s called home the past three years. Downstairs, he’s left behind his two bodyguards, who will spend the evening glowering at anyone entering or leaving the elevator. Up here, he’s exposed yet insulated—a billionaire in a gilded cage.

The waiters bring sushi and crispy shrimp, followed by bouillabaisse, fish, and steak. Firtash says no to a lot of it, including wine. Seated at the table, he pinches his belly self-consciously. A firefighter in his younger days, he says he still trains in martial arts six days a week. He’s 51, pale, burly, and broad-shouldered, with a shock of salt-and-pepper hair and a fighter’s crooked nose. Sipping water, he works to refute, or at least neutralize, the various stories that have been told about him. “I have never been to the U.S.,” he says in Russian, an interpreter by his side. “I don’t understand clearly the priorities of people there, what drives them. I’m sure that what they think about me is negative, because there was a special machine of propaganda organized against me.”


Outside of a John le Carré novel, there may be no more perfectly embroiled middleman than Firtash. Russia and the former Soviet republics have more than a few embattled oligarchs, but only one stands accused of being the missing link between Vladimir Putin and the Trump administration. Last summer, in the thick of the U.S. presidential campaign, a host of news reports noted that Firtash, a Ukrainian natural gas magnate, was the onetime business partner of Donald Trump adviser Paul Manafort, the Washington political operative who’d worked in Ukraine for Viktor Yanukovych, the country’s Russia-friendly kleptocratic president. (Yanukovych, for his part, appeared in the explosive, unverified opposition research dossier on Trump that went public just before the inauguration: He was the Ukrainian politician who was said to have assured Putin that no one would ever trace alleged cash payments to Manafort back to the Russian president.)

But the connection to Manafort, and Manafort’s connection to Trump, represent just the latest alleged entanglement for Firtash. There are the reports that, as a 50-50 partner in Ukraine’s natural gas business with Russia’s state-run Gazprom, he made his billions as Putin’s handpicked surrogate. There are the accusations, leveled by the U.S. Department of Justice, that Firtash benefited from an association with one of the world’s most powerful organized crime figures, Semion Mogilevich, who has appeared on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. Then, paradoxically, there are the warm friendships Firtash has cultivated with members of the British Foreign Office and the praise he’s received from cultural figures such as the French author and public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy. (“Frankly speaking,” Lévy tells me, “I do not believe all the terrible things I read about him.”)

Finally, there’s the criminal case Firtash is facing in the U.S.—a case with an imminent court date that, given the seemingly never-ending stream of allegations about the Trump administration’s relationship with Russia, is sure to be seen as a foreign policy test. The three-year-old indictment, out of a federal court in Chicago, accuses Firtash of plotting a bribery scheme to set up a $500 million titanium business in India, with Boeing as a potential client. (The deal never happened.) Firtash was arrested in Vienna in March 2014, three weeks after Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution ousted Yanukovych from office. But almost right away, an Austrian judge took the unusual step of denying the U.S. government’s extradition request, which he described as possibly politically motivated: “The aim was clearly to prevent [Firtash] from undermining the political interests of the U.S.,” the judge wrote at the time, “and with his arrest [he] was to be removed from Ukrainian politics.” Firtash was known to have supported Yanukovych, whom the U.S. opposed.

The U.S. Department of State disputed the judge’s decision, saying the case fits squarely under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and the Justice Department announced plans to appeal. Since then, Firtash has been a sort of prisoner in Austria, unable to leave the country for fear the U.S. will have more success extraditing him from wherever else he may go. Ukraine isn’t an option, either; the current government has turned its back on him. For now, Firtash is a very rich man without a country. Not that he doesn’t continue to maintain a proprietary interest in his native land: In addition to his natural gas interests, he owns TV stations and dominates the country’s fertilizer and chemical industries. “First of all, I’ve never left,” Firtash tells me. “I work with Ukrainian businesses and people. My plants keep on working. People come here, to me, to discuss everything. Many people cannot understand—I live for Ukraine.”
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Yanukovych and Firtash at the opening of a chemical plant in 2012.
The U.S. is scheduled to appeal Austria’s extradition decision in a Vienna courtroom on Feb. 21, just as Ukraine has once again become a flashpoint in the relationship between the U.S. and Russia. Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, resigned after allegedly concealing that before the inauguration he consulted with the Russian ambassador about the future of U.S. sanctions. The White House’s position on Ukraine’s war with Russian-backed separatists is hopelessly muddled: First, Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, blamed the violence on Russia; then Trump downplayed that position in a statement of his own. The FBI, meanwhile, is continuing to investigate Russia’s influence on the Trump campaign.

In all this, Firtash again finds himself the man in the middle—a canary in a coal mine for the Trump Justice Department. After Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, the Obama administration was widely perceived to be retaliating against Putin by going after his oligarchs. Should Firtash be forced into the U.S. to face charges, many observers have wondered, what might he have to offer the U.S. in exchange for a plea? Perhaps intelligence about Putin? About others in his inner circle? The U.S. has fought for extradition for three years—but there is a new president now. The Justice and State departments aren’t commenting on the case. But if the administration reverses course and no longer pushes hard on the Firtash prosecution, that would send a pretty clear signal that the president’s embrace of Russia and Putin is real.

“First of all, I don’t understand this word, ‘oligarch,’ ” Firtash says over dinner. “I would never call myself an oligarch. In my view, oligarchs are the servants of the state.”

So much talk about corruption and buying political influence, he says, gets it backwards. “Business doesn’t create corruption,” he says. “It’s civil servants and the politicians that create corruption in the country. Show me any businessman who would be willingly giving out money.” Businessmen such as he, Firtash argues, are what’s needed to keep a society stable, to create jobs and pay taxes. “From my point of view,” he says, “rich people have to be supported.”

Firtash spent his childhood in rural Ukraine and admits to certain Luddite inclinations: He doesn’t text, send e-mails, or operate computers, smartphones, or tablets. The one cell phone I see him use looks to be at least 10 years old. “I don’t want to live in the virtual world,” he tells me, “and waste time on this technological stuff.” Then again, his critics would say he has more reasons than most of us to avoid leaving a digital trail.

Firtash’s primary objection with most of what’s said about him, it seems, is the suggestion that he’s anybody’s stooge. He became rich, he says, through a combination of hard work and excellent timing. His favorite childhood story, one he’s told many times, is about how his family grew tomatoes and sold them in their village in Western Ukraine to supplement their paltry income under Soviet rule. “Today it would be called entrepreneurial dexterity,” he says. He leaves out some of the less flattering career highlights, like the time in 1995 he reportedly was jailed for three months for smuggling contraband alcohol.

After attending technical school and serving in the Soviet Army, Firtash married (the first of three marriages) and started a family. When the USSR collapsed, he was in his mid-20s and, like everyone around him, penniless. He moved to Moscow and slowly developed enough contacts to make money in the emerging barter economy that sustained the newly independent republics. With no reliable currency, every transaction required a middleman. His first major deal, he says, was trading Ukrainian powdered milk for Uzbeki cotton, then selling the cotton abroad, taking a cut for himself.

His big break came in the early ’90s with natural gas in Turkmenistan. “Turkmenistan had lots of gas,” he says, “but they had no idea how to sell it.” He offered a way to do it that was independent of Russia. According to Viktor Yushchenko, the governor of Ukraine’s central bank at the time, Firtash’s Turkmenistan gas deal was an important first step toward establishing Ukraine’s independence from Russian natural gas. “We were 100 percent dependent on Russian gas, Russian oil, so many products coming from Russia,” says Yushchenko, who served as Ukraine’s president from 2005 to 2010. “The biggest thing Russia wanted to see then was the failure of Ukraine. Russia started to block the energy supply to Ukraine, and we didn’t have any alternate supply. We had to fight for a long time to get rid of that monopoly.”
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Friends and Foes (from left)—Paul Manafort: Trump’s former campaign chairman and Firtash did business together. Viktor Yanukovych: The kleptocratic ex-president gave Firtash back his gas business. Viktor Yushchenko: This former Ukraine president is now a supporter of Firtash’s.
By the end of the ’90s, Firtash’s barter arrangements had gradually converted to cash. He became, despite his current protestations, an oligarch, personally controlling the transfer each year of 68 billion cubic meters of Central Asian gas. Some 14 billion cubic meters to 17 billion cubic meters, he estimates, were resold to Europe; the rest went to Ukrainian consumers. Then, by his account, in 2003, Putin swooped in to wet his beak. This wasn’t Putin handing him a piece of the gas industry, Firtash argues; it was Putin taking a piece of Firtash’s gas interests for himself. After a year of negotiations, Firtash emerged with control of half of a new company, RosUkrEnergo (RUE). The other half was owned by Gazprom. This was, in Firtash’s estimation, the big squeeze. “I didn’t enter their business,” he says. “They entered my business. All that I earned myself, I was supposed to share with Gazprom.”

Firtash says he never spoke with Putin personally about the arrangement. “I saw him, of course, but we never met, no,” he says, trying to dispel the notion that he’s close to the Russian president. (Russian government sources, too, have officially denied that Firtash is close to Putin.) But Putin, Firtash says, is in complete control of Gazprom; the deal couldn’t have happened without his say-so. Yushchenko agrees: “The only person in Russia who knows where and how much gas is to be supplied, that’s Putin.”

In the years that followed, many in Ukraine would call Firtash’s agreement a sweetheart deal. A Reuters investigation in 2014 showed that Gazprom sold more than 20 billion cubic meters of gas to Firtash over four years, four times more than publicly acknowledged, at a price so low that Firtash’s companies stood to make $3 billion. Following the pattern of Russian oligarchs in Putin’s circle, Firtash also, according to Reuters, received credit lines of as much as $11 billion, enough to expand his businesses from gas to other industries. “That again shows you the extremely close ties to Moscow,” says Taras Kuzio, a Toronto-based Ukrainian politics scholar. Firtash’s defenders have noted that Ukraine still got gas at below-market rates that sustained jobs in the country.


Russia was never satisfied with their partnership, Firtash argues. After a few years, he says, Gazprom attempted to cut side deals with the other former republics. Then came Yulia Tymoshenko, prime minister in the Yushchenko government, who canceled the RUE deal in 2009 in the name of liberating Ukraine from unnecessary “intermediaries.” In the West, Tymoshenko is known as one of the heroes of Ukraine’s 2004 pro-democracy Orange Revolution; but in Firtash’s telling, she is a venal politician who targeted him for her own financial gain. “She opened a public war against me,” Firtash says, and then she allowed Russia to drive up the price of gas immediately. “For Russia, this was a great solution,” he says. “All they tried to achieve in 2004 [with the RUE deal], they finished successfully in 2009 and got rid of me.”

When Tymoshenko mentioned intermediaries, she didn’t mean just Firtash. She also meant Semion Mogilevich, a Ukrainian businessman who the FBI has said runs a crime ring that spans 30 countries and has a hand in murder, public corruption, money laundering, and weapons trafficking. As early as 2006, an ally of Tymoshenko’s made a statement in Ukraine’s parliament accusing RUE of having Mogilevich as a silent partner. The question of Firtash’s ties to Mogilevich circulated for years until finally, in 2010, WikiLeaks released a confidential memo written two years earlier by William Taylor Jr., then U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, recounting a meeting he had with Firtash. In that meeting, Taylor wrote, Firtash said that he wouldn’t have gotten far in the gas business without the blessing of Mogilevich. Firtash has maintained that his comments were taken out of context and he has no link to Mogilevich. In my interview with Firtash, he refuses to comment on Mogilevich and the bribery case—in fact, those are the only matters his lawyers persuaded him not to comment on in advance of the extradition hearing.
Image

(From left) Petro Poroshenko: Ukraine’s president supports deoligarchization—so, not a friend. Semion Mogilevich: Wanted by the FBI; Firtash battles whispers that they’re connected. Yulia Tymoshenko: A Ukrainian cause célèbre, she’s clashed with Firtash.
In 2010, Firtash’s gas business was restored, thanks to a new president, Viktor Yanukovych, whom Firtash supported and who won his election with help from a paid political consultant, Manafort. This is the part of the story that came to light last summer in an exposé in the New York Times: The paper discovered ledgers suggesting that Yanukovych paid $13 million to Manafort in cash. No one has proved conclusively that those payments happened. Firtash’s name emerged as a possible connection, thanks, once again, to his old adversary Tymoshenko, when reports surfaced of a lawsuit she’d filed against Firtash and Manafort in civil court in the U.S. in 2011. In the complaint, which was rejected on jurisdictional grounds, Tymoshenko said a real estate project that Manafort and Firtash planned—a hotel and luxury shopping mall on the site of the Drake Hotel in Midtown Manhattan—was little more than a money-laundering operation. In the words of the complaint, it helped Firtash “to hide illegal kickbacks paid to government officials”—later specified as Yanukovych—“and place a significant portion of the proceeds from the gas contracts outside the reach of Ukrainian courts.”

“She was wrong in everything,” Firtash says of Tymoshenko. “She lies all the time. In order to money launder, you need to have dirty money to start with. I always had clean money.”

The allegations of a financial arrangement between Firtash and Manafort became a weapon for Democrats last year. Manafort resigned as Trump’s campaign manager in August, shortly after the ledgers were uncovered. Reached on the phone in February, Manafort hotly denies ever receiving cash from Yanukovych, laundering Firtash’s money, or serving any Russian agenda. “Making Yanukovych Putin’s stooge, and me a link to Putin, is the antithesis of the facts,” Manafort says. “I was integrally involved in the process that resulted in Ukraine becoming a part of the West. This was the opposite of what Russia wanted.” The real estate deal with Firtash, he says, “never got off the ground. Nothing ever was formalized, nothing was ever signed, no money ever transferred hands.”

At dinner with Firtash, I ask how he came to invest in the Drake Hotel project.

“I never invested,” he says.

Then what about the reports that he put $25 million in an escrow account for the developers? And the $100 million investment fund that Manafort helped him set up?

“We were considering that project,” he replies. “I wanted to be involved. I thought that America, at some stage, can be an interesting platform for investment.” But then, he says, he changed his mind.

From the start, Firtash’s legal team has argued that the timing of the U.S. indictment, issued in October 2013, was suspicious. In his 2014 decision to deny the extradition, the Austrian judge, Christoph Bauer, noted that a U.S. State Department delegation had just traveled to Kiev to push then-President Yanukovych to sign an association agreement with the European Union that would pull Ukraine further away from Putin’s influence. As soon as Yanukovych indicated he might not sign, the U.S. called on Austria to arrest Firtash. The U.S. diplomats knew he had influence on Yanukovych, the Vienna judge said, and the intent seemed to be to remove Firtash from circulation and weaken Yanukovych’s position.

Firtash got out of jail a week later on $174 million bail furnished by a friend of his: Russian billionaire Vasily Anisimov, who—stand by for more entanglements here—is a business partner of one of Putin’s closest allies, Arkady Rotenberg, who in turn had helped Firtash rebuild his natural gas business in 2010. The current Ukrainian government, under President Petro Poroshenko, is in the middle of a campaign of “deoligarchization” and has vowed to arrest Firtash on behalf of the U.S. if he comes home. “My view is in the nearest future, it will not be possible for him to return,” says Leonid Kravchuk, who from 1991 to 1994 was the first president of Ukraine. “They need to send him a message.”


Vladimir Putin: The real reason the Obama administration went after Firtash?
Yanukovych turned out to be a kleptocrat of the first order, building a $250 million estate for his family with public money, and as Ukrainians took to the streets, he fled to Moscow. Firtash has never stopped trying to influence Ukraine’s fate from abroad. In op-eds and interviews, he’s explained his belief that Ukraine should be like Switzerland, a neutral bridge between East and West, with allegiances neither to Russia nor to Europe and the U.S. At first, he supported Poroshenko, but has since changed his mind. Poroshenko, meanwhile, has defied Putin not only through his deoligarchization program but also by supporting Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, which puts Poroshenko in a difficult spot now.

The Trump transition team and administration appear to have spent the past several months in contact with forces that would work to destabilize the Poroshenko government—an outcome that, depending on who replaces him, could serve the interests of Putin. Tymoshenko is still in the mix, too, her profile bigger than ever after a prison sentence during the Yanukovych presidency turned her into more of a cause célèbre. Certainly if regime change happens in Ukraine, Firtash stands ready to step in and put his billions to work. His factories employ 110,000 people there—some of whom, he says, he continues to pay even as the continuing war has forced the factories to close temporarily. In Vienna last year he sponsored a conference to propose a plan for modernizing the Ukrainian economy—an effort that includes, among other measures, creating a less erratic tax policy that would make the country more hospitable to investment from foreign business. His efforts have won praise from two of Ukraine’s past presidents, Yushchenko and Kravchuk, as well as the French intellectual Lévy, who’s attached himself to the idea of Ukraine’s reinvention.

“Old Ukraine has been cannibalized by its oligarchs, that’s sure,” Lévy writes in an e-mail. “But I am sure, too, that Firtash is not worse than the others! There is clearly, among the Ukrainian political class, some sort of a settling of accounts turning against him. And there is also the fact that he has the reputation of being pro-Putin. But the impression I always had during our conversations about my dream of a Marshall Plan for Ukraine is that he is, in his way, a true Ukrainian patriot, with a very touching attachment to his country. I find this man a truly novelistic character,” Lévy concludes. “This, being who I am, is a real compliment.”

In Vienna, where his wife and two small children fly in from Kiev to see him on weekends, Firtash has set up a well-appointed base of operations. His mansion on Edenstrasse, near the Vienna State Opera, is the former home of Adele Bloch-Bauer, a wealthy patron of the arts whose portrait by Gustav Klimt was stolen by the Nazis and became known as Woman in Gold. When Firtash first moved in, he wasn’t aware that the Hollywood movie about the painting (also called Woman in Gold) had just come out. He assumed all the people taking pictures outside his house were from the CIA.

As our dinner ends, Firtash maintains that the real problem with Ukraine now is with the people in power. “These people will go—today, tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow,” he says. “The country will stay.” He has a different vision for Ukraine, a nationalist vision. “I think it’s best for Ukraine to be on its own. Ukraine, historically and geographically, has a strong territorial position. It needs to use it. We can become the industrial platform for Europe.”

It’s a vision not unlike that of the president who’s in a position to help him. “What is Trump doing?” Firtash says as waiters clear the dessert cart. “He’s saying, ‘We need to make our own production. We will sell what we produce. We will give you loans, and you will serve the loans and give the money back to us.’ I perfectly understand what he’s saying. That signal is clear to me. Ukraine is a small country, and clearly we cannot do like the U.S., but I understand what he’s doing.”

If the Austrian court beats back the extradition again, Firtash’s legal team will move to have the indictment against him dismissed. There is no indication from the Justice Department that it might back off, and doing so would be especially provocative right now in the wake of the Michael Flynn blowup. But this may be what Firtash has to offer Trump, should the case against him end up withering away: a chance to make Ukraine great again, with someone else footing the bill, and a new government willing to do business with both Russia and the West. How could Trump refuse an offer like that?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features ... ilded-cage


Media: Policeman and ‘private detective,’ who helped Firtash, condemned for corruption

By Interfax-Ukraine. Published Jan. 30. Updated Jan. 30 at 4:24 pm

(FILES) This file photo taken on April 30, 2015 shows Dmytro Firtash, one of Ukraine's most influential oligarchs attending a trial on April 30, 2015 in Vienna. An Austrian appeals court authorised on February 21, 2017 the extradition to the United States of Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash on bribery charges, overturning an earlier ruling. Firtash, 51, one of Ukraine's richest men and previously an ally of ousted president Viktor Yanukovych, was arrested in Austria in March 2014.

A former state police commissioner and a detective, who rendered services to Ukrainian businessman Dmytro Firtash, have been convicted of corruption on a large scale in Germany, according to the German edition Deutsche Welle (DW)
https://www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-politi ... ption.html.



google translate

German "spies" Firtash sentenced to prison
Former police commissioner of land and "detektyvku" services are used, in particular, Ukrainian businessman Dmitry Firtash in Germany found guilty of corruption in a large scale.
 default
In the trial devoted to consideration of one of the biggest corruption scandals in Germany last year, which involved, in particular, the famous Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, the set point. On Friday, January 27, the Land Court in the North German city of Schwerin sentenced in the case of the former Chief Commissioner of Criminal Police of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Heinz-Peter Handorfa (Heinz-Peter Hahndorf) and former GDR secret service ahentky "Stasi" Christina (Nina ) Vilkeninґ (Christina Wilkening).
The former civil servant was sentenced to three years in prison for taking bribes on a large scale, the disclosure of official secrets and tax evasion. Vilkeninґ, which calls itself "private detektyvkoyu" will have to spend in prison for two years and ten months. Except in bribes, it also recognized guilty of incitement to issuance of official secrets, DW reported in the press service of the court.
Traces tycoon
For seven years spilnytstva prisoners during which the civil servant received the "detektyvky" round sum for the provision of various kinds of service information, and the case was associated with Firtash. It is at this stage Vilkeninґ Handorf and caught the attention of investigators. To avoid his extradition from Austria to the United States, where he faces the confiscation of property and long prison on corruption charges, the oligarch, according to prosecutors Schwerin, requested the services of Vilkeninґ.
 Firtash
Ukrainian businessman Dmitry Firtash
The same, in turn, gave instructions to the then Commissioner for contact with American law enforcement and intelligence agencies and get the inside information on the case oligarch. Although the deal ultimately fell through, the woman, according to the charges, paid accomplices to work 26 thousand euros. Total in connection with the Firtash, as prosecutors said in court Vilkeninґ received about 420 thousand euros. However she admitted in court that he personally received about 110 thousand euros for work connected with business tycoon.
750 thousand euros for services
Overall, performing various assignments former commissioner, according to investigators, during spilnytstva received from former ahentky about 270 thousand euros. If Firtash order was made for the work Vilkeninґ could get from a businessman to a total of 750 thousand euros, said in court charges.
DW.COM

The failure of "Operation stuffed cabbage": German spies tried Firtash
Austria is studying a request for extradition to Spain Firtash
In the German case Firtash arising komprometuvalni documents
Sentence prisoners during the course of the process are significantly reduced due to the fact that both pleaded guilty. At first they threatened to ten years in prison. The latest charges were demanding three years and two months in prison for ex-commissioner and three years - for Vilkeninґ.
However, before the opening of the criminal case against Firtash trial in Germany so far did not succeed. Although the "spy" case and added instructions for the signature of Dmitry Firtash, issued by the then Commissioner and his assistant, confirmed that DW and lawyers oligarch potential criminal action component of the oligarch was the theme of the court session, the court said. Representatives of billionaire last year rejected any accusations, citing the fact that Firtash supposedly did not know that in fact these people were police officers, and they were represented by lawyers as a businessman.
http://www.dw.com/uk/німецьких-шпигунів-фірташа-засудили-до-позбавлення-волі/a-37299866
[/quote]
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Aug 04, 2017 2:07 pm

We’re Back to Manafort

By JOSH MARSHALL Published AUGUST 4, 2017 11:28 AM

A couple days ago, before yesterday’s grand jury revelations, I got an email from TPM Reader RV flagging a story on Paul Manafort in a Kentucky alt-weekly by Kurt X. Metzmeier, a law librarian at the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law. The article is builds off Metzmeier’s earlier life as a graduate student and researcher interested in the late 20th century superpower confrontation in Africa and some of the unlovelier dimensions of US foreign policy.

Needless to say, this brought Paul Manafort across his radar, a man who long before the Trump era had developed a reputation as a go-to lobbyist and advisor for some of the world’s most rancid dictators and war criminals. Read the piece for that part of the story. But there’s a dimension of the story which got my attention. It’s a dimension so obvious that I genuinely do not know why it hadn’t clicked with me earlier. It’s quite possible this was obvious to everyone but me and somehow I was the only one who missed this or failed to fully grasp the significance. But however that may be, here goes.

This passage in Metzmeier’s piece comes after regaling readers with some highlights of the Manafort story which includes rubbing shoulders with and working with some of the nastiest characters of the late 20th century and crossing paths with and working with spooks of all sorts – particularly those of the US and those of the former Soviet Union and its successor states.

Which returns me to the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016. While Don Jr. could be described charitably as an upper-class twit, and Jared Kushner as an overconfident political novice, Manafort has been in so many shady meetings like this it would take IBM’s Watson to keep up with them. In fact, he could dictate the “Petersen’s Field Guide to Bag Men, Contract Spies, Cutouts, and Other Shadowy Figures” to a secretary over a long weekend — with enough spare time to draft a script treatment for a “House of Cards” story arc.

So, while Don Jr. and the Russian lawyer set up the crowded meeting, the real principals were likely campaign manager Manafort and Rinat Akhmetshin, a pro-Russian lobbyist with ties to Putin’s intelligence apparatus. Some stories suggest Manafort was fiddling with his smartphone all meeting — maybe texting LOLs to Akhmetshin? (Although perhaps he was taking the meeting notes he reportedly has turned over to the Senate.)

Whether the speculation in the second paragraph is in any way accurate I have no idea. But the observation in the first is just unquestionably the case. Indeed, it is so obviously so that I still don’t know why it hit me only when I read this piece. Don Jr. is a moron. Kushner may not be a moron but certainly a year ago he was altogether new to this world of spycraft and international intrigue. While even a fool as big as Don Jr. could not have missed the plain words of Goldstone’s letter in which he says he is speaking as an intermediary of a Russian government effort to elect his father, certainly other aspects of the approach could have eluded him. Same with Kushner. But this was literally Manafort’s world. Not just working in and around spies for years but for more than a decade doing so in the lands of the former Soviet Union. It is simply not possible that the nature of what was happening and what was being discussed wasn’t immediately clear to Manafort.

And yet, so far as we know, he made no effort to cut the meeting short or the larger line of communication off. There was no note to file written to protect himself or the campaign later. And we appear to know to close to a certainty that he made no effort to contact US intelligence authorities or the Secret Service or even notify the campaign’s own lawyers of what was happening.

Again, this should have been completely obvious to me from the start. I’m not sure why it wasn’t. But Manafort is really the key person in the meeting. That is not simply because he was the campaign manager but because he – not simply unique in the Trump campaign but uniquely for almost anyone involved in any way in any part of the 2016 presidential campaign, among operatives, journalists, anyone – had the experience and background to essentially guarantee he knew what that meeting was about.

And yet, he seems to have done nothing – at least nothing to block or stymie what the Russians on the other side of the approach were trying to achieve.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/wer ... o-manafort


Manafort and Me… or the Manafort you do not know
AUG
02
2017

BY KURT X. METZMEIER

News that Paul Manafort was testifying last week to the U.S. Senate intelligence committee takes me back to March 2016 when I saw that he was joining the chaotic Trump campaign as an advisor on delegate and convention strategy (he later became campaign manager). I, unlike most Americans outside the beltway, said: “Hey, I’ve heard of that guy!” Later, when it was reported that Donald Trump Jr. had invited Manafort to a meeting with a bunch of shady Russians, including a rumored former Russian counter-intelligence agent, I was not surprised. In fact, I could only think that a room full of nepotists, ex-spies/lobbyists and people-on-the-take is Manafort’s most natural milieu.

I did not know Manafort because of his long history in GOP presidential campaigns from Gerald Ford to the elder George Bush, discussed in Franklin Foer’s excellent Slate essay “The Quiet American.” No, I first took note of him years ago because of events taking place in the 1980s, 7,000 miles away in Africa.

Although my research is now mainly in legal history, back then I was a UofL graduate student, an occasional contract researcher and anti-Apartheid activist interested in U.S. foreign policy, especially the competition of American and Soviet policy in Africa during the Cold War. This was the subject of my master’s thesis — a swashbuckling tale of the funding of the Volta Dam in Ghana during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. OK, substitute “overly detailed and kind of boring” for “swashbuckling.”

Manafort attracted my notice because of the efforts of his former D.C. lobbying firm, Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly, to sell the Reagan Administration on Jonas Savimbi’s attempt to overthrow the Soviet-aligned government of Angola. (Yes, the Stone is Trump loyalist, Roger Stone). The well-coifed Manafort was the point man and earned a $600,000 fee from Savimbi’s UNITA movement by convincing Reagan and U.S. conservatives that they were heroic “freedom fighters” struggling to create a model democracy in Africa. Reagan gave Manafort’s clients a $25 million military aid package, including several of the then-prized Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. (Just like the Islamic fundamentalists fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan received — we all remember how well that turned out).

While working for my former thesis advisor as a researcher on a historical dictionary of Angola, I learned more about what Manafort had omitted from the story of his client. This included Savimbi’s brutal authoritarian rule over the areas under the control of his forces, his past as a Maoist (until the Chinese money ran out) and the fact that supposedly Communist Angola had very cordial relations with the U.S. company that ran its oil industry, Chevron. In one dramatic story, Savimbi reportedly rounded up internal dissidents and burned them as witches. Now, that’s a political witch-hunt, Mr. President!

Manafort continued his business of putting lipstick on pro-Western dictators, such as kleptocrat Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, with such success that it was impossible to study the darker side of U.S. foreign policy without running across him. In 1992, he was featured prominently in the Center for Public Integrity’s landmark report “The Torturers’ Lobby: How Human Rights-Abusing Nations Are Represented in Washington.” His mother must have been so proud.

After the cold war, Manafort re-engineered his business for a new line of dictator — authoritarian leaders in the former Soviet republics. Soon he hooked up with Vladimir Putin’s favorite Ukrainian, pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych. According to Ukraine’s anti-corruption bureau, Manafort received $12.7 million over a decade to install Yanukovych as president in 2010 and to defend the imprisonment of his opponent, Yulia Tymoshenko. (Tymoshenko might have been lucky; another Yanukovych opponent, Viktor Yushchenko, was a dioxin-poisoning victim the year before Manafort was hired.)

Manafort was still on the payroll in 2014 when riot police fired on protesters, killing 53 people, and Yanukovych was forced to flee to Moscow.

One can only imagine suave Paul rubbing up with former KGB agents he once passed in the airports of Kinshasa or Manila. I’m sure they laughed about old times, sharing stories of daredevil days of their Cold War youth, before turning to the business of shoveling money out of the treasuries of these new and unsuspecting states.

Which returns me to the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016. While Don Jr. could be described charitably as an upper-class twit, and Jared Kushner as an overconfident political novice, Manafort has been in so many shady meetings like this it would take IBM’s Watson to keep up with them. In fact, he could dictate the “Petersen’s Field Guide to Bag Men, Contract Spies, Cutouts, and Other Shadowy Figures” to a secretary over a long weekend — with enough spare time to draft a script treatment for a “House of Cards” story arc.

So, while Don Jr. and the Russian lawyer set up the crowded meeting, the real principals were likely campaign manager Manafort and Rinat Akhmetshin, a pro-Russian lobbyist with ties to Putin’s intelligence apparatus. Some stories suggest Manafort was fiddling with his smartphone all meeting — maybe texting LOLs to Akhmetshin? (Although perhaps he was taking the meeting notes he reportedly has turned over to the Senate.)

Many of the news stories speculate on the legal liability of various individuals in the Trump inner circle, but that misses the point. Special Counsel Bob Mueller has surrounded himself with tough investigators who, like him, made their careers prosecuting organized crime. If there was a conspiracy to collude with the Russians, any major prosecution will focus first on the Trump campaign as an organization, with all the various acts tied back to it. In the middle of the web (as either lead conspirator or Mueller’s star witness) will be campaign manager Paul Manafort, still attracting my attention all these years later.
https://www.leoweekly.com/2017/08/manaf ... -not-know/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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