Ex-Trump campaign managerfaces new allegations over 'black ledger' payments

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A Ukrainian lawmaker today said he has fresh proof that President Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, received illegal, off-the-books payments from the country’s toppled pro-Russian president.
Coming a day after the FBI confirmed it is investigating potential links between Trump’s presidential campaign and alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections, it revives a saga that has drawn intense scrutiny of Manafort’s possible connections with Moscow through Ukraine that appeared to force him to resign as Trump’s adviser in the summer.
Serhiy Leshchenko, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, presented in a news conference in Kiev this morning what he alleged was a contract showing Manafort had received $750,000 in a fake deal from a company connected to the party of former president Viktor Yanukovych.
Leshchenko said the allegedly phony deal, which he says channeled money through offshore accounts, was meant to conceal what was in reality an illegal payment for Manafort’s work as a political consultant for Yanukovych.
Leshchenko said the contract, which he says bears Manafort’s signature and company stamp, provides potential proof of allegations first raised by investigators in August that Manafort may have received illegal cash from Yanukovych, who is accused by Ukrainian prosecutors of large-scale corruption.
Manafort denied the allegations at the time, and a spokesman told ABC News today, referring to the National Anticorruption Bureau of Ukraine, “The allegations against Paul Manafort are baseless, as reflected by the numerous statements from NABU officials who have questioned the validity of the so-called ledger evidence against Mr. Manafort. Any new allegations by Serhiy Leshchenko should be seen in that light and summarily dismissed.”
Leshchenko today published scans of the alleged contract, but ABC News was unable to immediately verify the documents’ authenticity.
His allegations return the spotlight to a corruption inquiry that appeared to cost Manafort his job last year. The case threw attention then onto the time that Manafort spent advising Yanukovych, whom Moscow for years backed as its preferred leader for Ukraine, highlighting the ex-Trump adviser’s long, tangled history with the region’s elites.
Manafort’s name turned up last August in what Ukrainian anticorruption investigators have called the “black ledger,” a handwritten accounting book they say details the illegal secret payments of Yanukovych’s political party, the Party of Regions, discovered in the party’s ransacked offices after the country’s 2014 revolution.
After The New York Times broke that story, Leshchenko published pages he said were from the ledger that included the entries where Manafort’s name appeared alongside alleged payments. Amid intense media scrutiny, Manafort resigned from the Trump campaign. But he has denied that he ever received any of the payments mentioned in the ledger and argues the records are fake.
Leshchenko, however, now says the new contract potentially offers proof Manafort received the illegal cash. The five-page contract printed on a letter-head for Manafort’s political consultancy firm, Davis Manafort, promises to deliver 501 computers to the firm Neocom Systems Limited that is registered in Belize, in return for $750,000. The document is signed with a signature that resembled copies of Manafort’s available in open sources.
The contract’s date and amount to be paid match one of the payments recorded next to Manafort’s name in the ledger: for the same amount $750,000, dated Oct. 9, 2014.
Leshchenko says the contract itself is highly suspicious, asking why Manafort, a political consultant, would be involved in supplying computers. The payment setup is also suspect, he says: Payment for the computers comes from a bank, AsiaUniversalBank, located in the central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan and that was seized in 2012 by regulators over widespread money laundering allegations. The bank has been linked to numerous money-laundering schemes involving offshore companies involving Ukraine and Russia.
Leshchenko alleges the computers were never delivered and that the supposed contract was cover to allow Yanukovych to pay Manafort from his party’s illegal slush fund. The suspicious setup of the alleged payment means it should be investigated by Ukrainian and U.S. law enforcement, Leshchenko said.
He called on the FBI specifically to investigate Manafort because the contract contains a U.S. bank account number where Manafort purportedly received the payment, registered to an address in Alexandria, Virginia.
“Ukrainian law enforcement bodies “are not able to get this information about banking secrets,” Leshchenko said in the news conference. “And we know that the FBI can get this information. This is the jurisdiction of the FBI and I believe that this investigation will be done by American law enforcement bodies and we will support this.”
Manafort worked for years as a political consultant to Yanukovych and his party, credited by party representatives with engineering Yanukovych’s comeback after he was pushed from the presidency for a first time by pro-Western protests during Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004. After Yanukovych was toppled in Ukraine’s second revolution in 2014 and fled to Russia, Manafort has said he no longer works with the Party of Regions or its post-revolutionary successor.
Manafort has also done business with one of Russia’s richest men, Oleg Deripaska, an influential metals magnet. The two eventually fell out.
Manafort’s unusual connections with major powerbrokers in Ukraine and Russia have prompted Trump’s opponents to seize on him as one of the most likely potential points of contact with the Russian government.
FBI director James Comey Monday confirmed at a House Intelligence Committee hearing that the agency is probing possible links between Russia and the Trump campaign. The New York Times has reported that Manafort is one of four Trump associates under investigation by the FBI, citing anonymous officials.
Manafort has called the allegations against him baseless and politically motivated, and said he has not been informed by U.S. authorities of any investigation.
“I had no role or involvement in the cyberattack on the DNC [Democratic National Committee] or the subsequent release of information gained from the attack, and I have never spoken with any Russian government officials or anyone who claimed to have been involved in the attack,” Manafort told ABC News Monday in response to Comey’s testimony. “The suggestion that I ever worked in concert with anyone to release hacked emails or sought to undermine the interests of the United States is false.”
Doubts have arisen around the case involving the Ukrainian “black ledger,” which has become the subject of a murky political battle within Ukraine itself. There have been suggestions that Ukrainian politicians, worried by Trump’s friendly statements toward Russia, had released it last summer with the goal of harming his campaign.
Ukraine’s anticorruption bureau, however, has not suggested it doubts the ledger is real and one case has already been submitted to court based on the ledger’s evidence.
Leschenko said the new documents had been found by tenants in Manafort’s former office in Kiev and passed to him in January.
Whether Manafort is actually subject to an investigation in Ukraine is still unclear. The anticorruption bureau has said it is investigating the ledger as a whole, and that it is, therefore, looking at how Manafort’s name appeared there. But it has refused to say whether there is an investigation targeting him specifically.
CNN reported last week that Ukrainian law enforcement officials have for months submitted requests to the FBI for assistance in questioning Manafort but that those requests have so far gone unanswered. U.S. authorities confirmed to CNN that the requests were made but declined to comment further. FBI director Comey declined to comment on the case when asked about it at Monday’s congressional hearing.
Leshchenko today said he could not comment on whether U.S. authorities had reached out to him about the new documents.

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