m*****s
发帖数: 4427 | 1 原来如此！
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/secret-ledger-in-ukraine-lists-cash-for-donald-trump%e2%80%99s-campaign-chief/ar-BBvCJjt?li=BBnbcA1&ocid=mailsignoutmd
KIEV, Ukraine — On a leafy side street off Independence Square in Kiev is
an office used for years by Donald J. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul
Manafort, when he consulted for Ukraine’s ruling political party. His
furniture and personal items were still there as recently as May.
And Mr. Manafort’s presence remains elsewhere here in the capital, where
government investigators examining secret records have found his name, as
well as companies he sought business with, as they try to untangle a corrupt
network they say was used to loot Ukrainian assets and influence elections
during the administration of Mr. Manafort’s main client, former President
Viktor F. Yanukovych.
Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments
designated for Mr. Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political
party from 2007 to 2012, according to Ukraine’s newly formed National Anti-
Corruption Bureau. Investigators assert that the disbursements were part of
an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included election
officials.
Sign Up For NYT Now's Morning Briefing Newsletter
In addition, criminal prosecutors are investigating a group of offshore
shell companies that helped members of Mr. Yanukovych’s inner circle
finance their lavish lifestyles, including a palatial presidential residence
with a private zoo, golf course and tennis court. Among the hundreds of
murky transactions these companies engaged in was an $18 million deal to
sell Ukrainian cable television assets to a partnership put together by Mr.
Manafort and a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, a close ally of President
Vladimir V. Putin.
Mr. Manafort’s involvement with moneyed interests in Russia and Ukraine had
previously come to light. But as American relationships there become a
rising issue in the presidential campaign — from Mr. Trump’s favorable
statements about Mr. Putin and his annexation of Crimea to the suspected
Russian hacking of Democrats’ emails — an examination of Mr. Manafort’s
activities offers new details of how he mixed politics and business out of
public view and benefited from powerful interests now under scrutiny by the
new government in Kiev.
Anti-corruption officials there say the payments earmarked for Mr. Manafort,
previously unreported, are a focus of their investigation, though they have
yet to determine if he actually received the cash. While Mr. Manafort is
not a target in the separate inquiry of offshore activities, prosecutors say
he must have realized the implications of his financial dealings.
“He understood what was happening in Ukraine,” said Vitaliy Kasko, a
former senior official with the general prosecutor’s office in Kiev. “It
would have to be clear to any reasonable person that the Yanukovych clan,
when it came to power, was engaged in corruption.”
Mr. Kasko added, “It’s impossible to imagine a person would look at this
and think, ‘Everything is all right.’”
Mr. Manafort did not respond to interview requests or written questions from
The New York Times. But his lawyer, Richard A. Hibey, said Mr. Manafort had
not received “any such cash payments” described by the anti-corruption
officials.
Mr. Hibey also disputed Mr. Kasko’s suggestion that Mr. Manafort might have
countenanced corruption or been involved with people who took part in
illegal activities.
“These are suspicions, and probably heavily politically tinged ones,” said
Mr. Hibey, a member of the Washington law firm Miller & Chevalier. “It is
difficult to respect any kind of allegation of the sort being made here to
smear someone when there is no proof and we deny there ever could be such
proof.”
Mysterious Payments
The developments in Ukraine underscore the risky nature of the international
consulting that has been a staple of Mr. Manafort’s business since the
1980s, when he went to work for the Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
Before joining Mr. Trump’s campaign this spring, Mr. Manafort’s most
prominent recent client was Mr. Yanukovych, who — like Mr. Marcos — was
deposed in a popular uprising.
Before he fled to Russia two years ago, Mr. Yanukovych and his Party of
Regions relied heavily on the advice of Mr. Manafort and his firm, who
helped them win several elections. During that period, Mr. Manafort never
registered as a foreign agent with the United States Justice Department —
as required of those seeking to influence American policy on behalf of
foreign clients — although one of his subcontractors did.
It is unclear if Mr. Manafort’s activities necessitated registering. If
they were limited to advising the Party of Regions in Ukraine, he probably
would not have had to. But he also worked to burnish his client’s image in
the West and helped Mr. Yanukovych’s administration draft a report
defending its prosecution of his chief rival, Yulia V. Tymoshenko, in 2012.
Whatever the case, absent a registration — which requires disclosure of how
much the registrant is being paid and by whom — Mr. Manafort’s
compensation has remained a mystery. However, a cache of documents
discovered after the fall of Mr. Yanukovych’s government may provide some
answers.
The papers, known in Ukraine as the “black ledger,” are a chicken-scratch
of Cyrillic covering about 400 pages taken from books once kept in a third-
floor room in the former Party of Regions headquarters on Lipskaya Street in
Kiev. The room held two safes stuffed with $100 bills, said Taras V.
Chornovil, a former party leader who was also a recipient of the money at
times. He said in an interview that he had once received $10,000 in a “wad
of cash” for a trip to Europe.
“This was our cash,” he said, adding that he had left the party in part
over concerns about off-the-books activity. “They had it on the table,
stacks of money, and they had lists of who to pay.”
The National Anti-Corruption Bureau, which obtained the ledger, said in a
statement that Mr. Manafort’s name appeared 22 times in the documents over
five years, with payments totaling $12.7 million. The purpose of the
payments is not clear. Nor is the outcome, since the handwritten entries
cannot be cross-referenced against banking records, and the signatures for
receipt have not yet been verified.
“Paul Manafort is among those names on the list of so-called ‘black
accounts of the Party of Regions,’ which the detectives of the National
Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine are investigating,” the statement said.
“We emphasize that the presence of P. Manafort’s name in the list does not
mean that he actually got the money, because the signatures that appear in
the column of recipients could belong to other people.”
The accounting records surfaced this year, when Serhiy A. Leshchenko, a
member of Parliament who said he had received a partial copy from a source
he did not identify, published line items covering six months of outlays in
2012 totaling $66 million. In an interview, Mr. Leshchenko said another
source had provided the entire multiyear ledger to Viktor M. Trepak, a
former deputy director of the domestic intelligence agency of Ukraine, the S
.B.U., who passed it to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau.
The bureau, whose government funding is mandated under American and European
Union aid programs and which has an evidence-sharing agreement with the F.B
.I., has investigatory powers but cannot indict suspects. Only if it passes
its findings to prosecutors — which has not happened with Mr. Manafort —
does a subject of its inquiry become part of a criminal case.
Individual disbursements reflected in the ledgers ranged from a few hundred
dollars to millions of dollars. Of the records released from 2012, one shows
a payment of $67,000 for a watch and another of $8.4 million to the owner
of an advertising agency for campaign work for the party before elections
that year.
“It’s a very vivid example of how political parties are financed in
Ukraine,” said Daria N. Kaleniuk, the executive director of the Anti-
Corruption Action Center in Kiev. “It represents the very dirty cash
economy in Ukraine.”
Offshore Companies
While working in Ukraine, Mr. Manafort had also positioned himself to profit
from business deals that benefited from connections he had gained through
his political consulting. One of them, according to court filings, involved
a network of offshore companies that government investigators and
independent journalists in Ukraine have said was used to launder public
money and assets purportedly stolen by cronies of the government.
The network comprised shell companies whose ultimate owners were shielded by
the secrecy laws of the offshore jurisdictions where they were registered,
including the British Virgin Islands, Belize and the Seychelles.
In a recent interview, Serhiy V. Gorbatyuk, Ukraine’s special prosecutor
for high-level corruption cases, pointed to an open file on his desk
containing paperwork for one of the shell companies, Milltown Corporate
Services Ltd., which played a central role in the state’s purchase of two
oil derricks for $785 million, or about double what they were said to be
worth.
“This,” he said, “was an offshore used often by Mr. Yanukovych’s
entourage.”
The role of the offshore companies in business dealings involving Mr.
Manafort came to light because of court filings in the Cayman Islands and in
a federal court in Virginia related to an investment fund, Pericles
Emerging Markets. Mr. Manafort and several partners started the fund in 2007
, and its major backer was Mr. Deripaska, the Russian mogul, to whom the
State Department has refused to issue a visa, apparently because of
allegations linking him to Russian organized crime, a charge he has denied.
Mr. Deripaska agreed to commit as much as $100 million to Pericles so it
could buy assets in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, including a regional cable
television and communications company called Black Sea Cable. But corporate
records and court filings show that it was hardly a straightforward
transaction.
The Black Sea Cable assets were controlled by a rotating cast of offshore
companies that led back to the Yanukovych network, including, at various
times, Milltown Corporate Services and two other companies well known to law
enforcement officials, Monohold A.G. and Intrahold A.G. Those two companies
won inflated contracts with a state-run agricultural company, and also
acquired a business center in Kiev with a helicopter pad on the roof that
would ease Mr. Yanukovych’s commute from his country estate to the
presidential offices.
A Disputed Investment
Mr. Deripaska would later say he invested $18.9 million in Pericles in 2008
to complete the acquisition of Black Sea Cable. But the planned purchase —
including the question of who ended up with the Black Sea assets — has
since become the subject of a dispute between Mr. Deripaska and Mr. Manafort.
In 2014, Mr. Deripaska filed a legal action in a Cayman Islands court
seeking to recover his investment in Pericles, which is now defunct. He also
said he had paid about $7.3 million in management fees to the fund over two
years. Mr. Deripaska did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Manafort’s lawyer, Mr. Hibey, disputed the account of the Black Sea
Cable deal contained in Mr. Deripaska’s Cayman filings, and said the
Russian oligarch had overseen details of the final transaction involving the
acquisition. He denied that Mr. Manafort had received management fees from
Pericles during its operation, but said that one of Mr. Manafort’s partners
, Rick Gates, who is also working on the Trump campaign, had received a “
nominal” sum.
Court papers indicate that Pericles’ only deal involved Black Sea Cable.
Mr. Manafort continued working in Ukraine after the demise of Mr. Yanukovych
’s government, helping allies of the ousted president and others form a
political bloc that opposed the new pro-Western administration. Some of his
aides were in Ukraine as recently as this year, and Ukrainian company
records give no indication that Mr. Manafort has formally dissolved the
local branch of his company, Davis Manafort International, directed by a
longtime assistant, Konstantin V. Kilimnik.
At Mr. Manafort’s old office on Sofiivska Street, new tenants said they had
discovered several curiosities apparently left behind, including a knee X-
ray signed by Mr. Yanukovych, possibly referring to tennis matches played
between Mr. Manafort and Mr. Yanukovych, who had spoken publicly of a knee
ailment affecting his game.
There was another item with Mr. Yanukovych’s autograph: a piece of white
paper bearing a rough sketch of Independence Square, the site of the 2014
uprising that drove him from power. | l*****8
发帖数: 16949 | 2 乌克兰和鹅毛现在是仇敌吧。Manafort到底是哪头的？ | T**********2
发帖数: 2198 | 3 哈哈，说左逼智商低真是低
用乌克兰来论证俄罗斯，卧槽这么说地球和月球差异也没那么大的
corrupt
elections
【在 m*****s 的大作中提到】
: 原来如此！
: http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/secret-ledger-in-ukraine-lists-cash-for-donald-trump%e2%80%99s-campaign-chief/ar-BBvCJjt?li=BBnbcA1&ocid=mailsignoutmd
: KIEV, Ukraine — On a leafy side street off Independence Square in Kiev is
: an office used for years by Donald J. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul
: Manafort, when he consulted for Ukraine’s ruling political party. His
: furniture and personal items were still there as recently as May.
: And Mr. Manafort’s presence remains elsewhere here in the capital, where
: government investigators examining secret records have found his name, as
: well as companies he sought business with, as they try to untangle a corrupt
: network they say was used to loot Ukrainian assets and influence elections
| i***a
发帖数: 4718 | 4 Manafort 和亲俄的乌克兰前总统Yanukovych一伙。
Yanukovych现在流亡在俄罗斯。
【在 l*****8 的大作中提到】
: 乌克兰和鹅毛现在是仇敌吧。Manafort到底是哪头的？
| j*********r
发帖数: 24733 | | h*********r
发帖数: 10182 | 6 右逼川屎粉，真你妈弱智。这个manafort支持的是亲苏的那派的。
【在 T**********2 的大作中提到】
: 哈哈，说左逼智商低真是低
: 用乌克兰来论证俄罗斯，卧槽这么说地球和月球差异也没那么大的
:
: corrupt
: elections
| g******a
发帖数: 778 | 7 挺好的，再捎上老床铺勾结普金黑希拉里电邮的段子，赶紧上广告
【在 i***a 的大作中提到】
: Manafort 和亲俄的乌克兰前总统Yanukovych一伙。
: Yanukovych现在流亡在俄罗斯。
| h*********r
发帖数: 10182 | 8 russian hacker很可能是这家伙背后支持的。
【在 i***a 的大作中提到】
: Manafort 和亲俄的乌克兰前总统Yanukovych一伙。
: Yanukovych现在流亡在俄罗斯。
| j*********r
发帖数: 24733 | |
|
