Manafort joined Trump as Ukraine work dried up, cash woes rose

Bloomberg

Among the enduring curiosities of Donald Trump’s presidential run was his announcement that campaign chairman Paul Manafort was an unpaid volunteer.
Why would a longtime political fixer do that? That question has grown more persistent thanks to successive indictments of Manafort by US Special Counsel Robert Mueller, each documenting in finer detail Manafort’s allegedly fraudulent scramble for cash just as he was taking the campaign job in spring 2016. “Manafort looks like he’s in dire straits,” said former federal prosecutor Peter Zeidenberg. “Then he drops everything to work for free for Trump. It’s very strange.”
Mueller now has a better view on the mystery. Manafort’s longtime business partner, Rick Gates, pleaded guilty February 23 to conspiracy and false statements. He’s telling prosecutors about crimes he said he committed with Manafort. The special counsel, who is investigating whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia in the 2016 election, may seek to determine whether Manafort sought to benefit in some way from his unpaid work, Zeidenberg said.
Manafort, who denies wrongdoing, will appear in court for arraignments on two new indictments unsealed last week by Mueller’s prosecutors. They laid out how they said Manafort tried to hide the millions of dollars he made as a political consultant for pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine, and then came under increasing financial pressure after his Ukrainian work began to dry up.
That portrait is bolstered by previously unreported accounts of Manafort’s work for pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine — including some as recently as six months before he took his job with Trump’s campaign.
Manafort made 17 trips to Ukraine in 2014 and 2015, Ukrainian prosecutors who have records of his travel told Bloomberg. That work is more recent than the undisclosed lobbying activities Mueller has described in his indictments. That later work wasn’t as profitable as earlier efforts in Ukraine, largely because Manafort’s top Ukrainian client, former President Viktor Yanukovych, had by then fled to Russia, other people familiar with the situation said. Manafort didn’t get paid for some of the work he did on Ukrainian elections in late 2015, one of these people said.
When Manafort is arraigned in Washington, it will be his first time in court without Gates, who was indicted with him on Oct. 27.
The Gates guilty plea prompted Manafort to say he hoped his longtime associate “would have had the strength to continue the battle to prove our innocence.”

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Gates worked with Manafort for a decade in Ukraine, serving as a loyal wingman. In his guilty plea, Gates admitted that he helped Manafort set up dozens of undisclosed offshore bank accounts, hide their work as unregistered agents for Ukraine and launder millions of dollars into the US Manafort convinced Gates to help him create false documents for banks, urged his son-in-law to lie to a bank appraiser and misled lenders about the use of loans, prosecutors charged.
One reason for Manafort’s depleting cash flow was that the bulk of the work he did with Gates in Ukraine began to dry up when Yanukovych fled to Moscow after widespread popular protest in 2014.
Manafort returned to Ukraine just months after Yanukovych was toppled and Russia annexed Crimea, advising the former president’s Party of Regions to rebrand itself as a catch-all party — the Opposition Bloc — that could be the voice of Russians in the east. Manafort was paid roughly $1 million for his work on the October 2014 parliamentary election, Nestor Shufrych, one of the Opposition Bloc’s leaders told Bloomberg in April.
Manafort’s last consulting assignment in Ukraine ended less than six months before he started working for the Trump campaign: He spent at least a month in Ukraine advising the Opposition Bloc ahead of local elections in October 2015, said the person familiar with the situation, adding that Manafort received payment for only part of that work.