Ukraine releases documents allegedly tying Trump advisor Paul Manafort to Yanukovych regime
Declassified accounting documents of the Ukrainian Party of Regions were published on Friday. They reflect payments in the amount of 12.7 million dollars to Paul Manafort, head of Trump’s electoral campaign.
Earlier this week, the Associated Press reported that Manafort helped the pro-Kremlin party to secretly transfer at least $2.2 million to two Washington lobbies. In an interview with Yahoo News, Manafort said that this information was incorrect.
The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, created in 2014 to conduct investigations on particularly large corruption cases, is studying the so-called "black bookkeeping" of the Party of Regions, which, according to the authorities, reflects informal cash payments to various individuals.
On Friday, the Bureau published 19 pages of materials that contain 22 expenditures entries, where Manafort was specified as the final recipient of funds totaling 12.7 million dollars.
At the same time, the Bureau says they cannot prove that Manafort actually received the money, because a high-ranking representative of the Party of Regions signed the papers instead of him.
One of the columns contains handwritten notes about the purposes of payments, which include such items as "payment for Manafort’s services" and "payment on the Manafort’s contract." They refer to the period from November 2011 to October 2012.