MOSCOW: Once-secret accounting documents of Ukraine’s pro-Kremlin party were released Friday, purporting to show payments of $12.7 million earmarked for Paul Manafort, who resigned as Donald Trump’s campaign chairman following the revelations.
Manafort’s resignation comes a day after the Associated Press reported that confidential emails from his firm contradicted his claims that he had never lobbied on behalf of Ukrainian political figures in the U.S. The AP found that Manafort helped Ukraine’s Party of Regions secretly route at least $2.2 million to two Washington lobbying firms. Manafort told Yahoo News that the AP’s account was wrong.
Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau, which was set up in 2014 to deal with high-profile corruption cases, is studying the so-called black ledgers of the Party of Regions, which investigators believe are essentially logs of under-the-table cash payments that the party made to various individuals.
The bureau on Friday released 19 pages of the logs, which contain 22 line-item entries where Manafort is listed as the recipient of funds totaling $12.7 million. The bureau said that it cannot prove that Manafort actually received the money because other people including a prominent Party of the Regions deputy signed for him.
Notes describe what the payments were used for with entries such as “Payment for Manafort’s services,” dated between November 2011 and October 2012.
Manafort and business associate Rick Gates, another top strategist in Trump’s campaign, were working in 2012 on behalf of the political party of Ukraine’s then-president, Viktor Yanukovych.
People with direct knowledge of Gates’ work told the AP that, during the period when Gates and Manafort were consultants to Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, Gates was also helping steer the advocacy work done by a pro-Yanukovych nonprofit that hired two Washington lobbying firms.
The nonprofit, the newly created European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, was governed by a board that initially included parliament members from Yanukovych’s party. The nonprofit operation subsequently paid at least $2.2 million to the lobbying firms to advocate positions generally in line with those of Yanukovych’s government.