Manafort supported organized crime to win in Ukraine: new evidences

Date: 2004 – 2017

Location: Ukraine – USA

Paul Manafort, who was Trump’s campaign chief from May to August 2016, spent nearly a decade as a consultant to Ukraine’s Party of Regions and its standardbearer, Viktor Yanukovych.

Weeks before the December 2004 presidential “re”-election, a pro-Russian Ukrainian billionaire and major Party of Regions donor named Rinat Akhmetov asked Manafort to help with Yanukovych’s troubled campaign.

Manafort was hired to prepare the Party of Regions for the parliamentary elections of 2006, in which Yanukovych would try to reclaim the office of prime minister.

By 2006, Manafort and his team were the principal political consultants in the Party of Regions. Manafort’s job was to give the Party of Regions an “extreme makeover” and “change its image into a legitimate political party.”

A Party of Regions accounting book, dubbed the “black ledger” and obtained in August by Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), allegedly shows that Manafort was paid $12.7 million in cash by the party between Nov. 2007 and Oct. 2012.

Credits: NewsFromUkraine