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Eastern Europe
June 30, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 17
Ukraine anti-graft agencies did not probe Yanukovych payments to Manafort
bne IntelliNews
The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO), the country’s main anti-graft agencies, did not “officially” investigate possible off-the-book payments made to Donald Trump’s former presidential campaign manager Paul Manafort by Ukraine’s Party of Regions, pre- viously headed by ex-president Viktor Yanukovych, who is now living in exile in Russia.
“He neither was, nor is a Ukrainian public servant and thus cannot commit corrupt activities, under Ukrainian laws,” said a joint statement of the two agencies published on June 29. “This person’s ac- tions should be assessed by competent authorities of other states whose jurisdiction extends to inves- tigating possible instances of such wrongdoing.”
The statement followed a meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on June 20 in Washington.
In August 2016, NABU published copies of 19 pages of the so-called “black ledger” of shadow payments made by Ukraine’s former party of pow- er. According to the pages, more than $12.7mn was allocated to costs associated with Manafort between November 2007 and October 2012. The scandal led to Manafort’s resignation as Trump’s
campaign manager before the US elections in November 2016.
Many Kyiv-based politicians believe the leak was masterminded by Poroshenko’s entourage, in line with Kyiv’s open backing of Hillary Clinton during the US presidential elections.
The secret ledger appeared in Kyiv in May of the same year, when the ex-deputy head of the SBU security service, Viktor Trepak, announced that he had obtained documents of the Party of Regions from an undisclosed source, and that they showed that $2bn in cash was used to bribe both former and incumbent top officials. Trepak refused to specify names and later submitted these docu- ments to NABU for investigation.
On June 27, the Washington Post reported that Manafort has retroactively filed forms showing that his firm received $17.1mn in 2012-2014 from the Party of Regions.
Manafort disclosed the payments in a Foreign Agents Registration Act filing that was submitted to the US Justice Department. Over the past year, Manafort has repeatedly rejected any wrongdoing during his work in Ukraine.
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