Paul Manafort headed Donald Trump’s U.S. presidential campaign before resigning in the summer of 2016 following reports about his work as a consultant for Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine's former president. Manafort was a key figure in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. In 2018, Manafort was convicted of fraud and tax evasion. He later pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and obstruction of justice and began serving a 7.5-year prison sentence. He was released this year to home confinement as COVID-19 began sweeping through prisons.
Banks began flagging suspicious transactions involving Manafort’s accounts as far back as 2012, but some continued moving his money even as he became a central figure in a major American political scandal.
In 2017, JPMorgan Chase reported suspicious wire transfers totaling more than $322 million involving shell companies in Cyprus and other secrecy jurisdictions that had done business with Manafort. At least $40.2 million involved the political consultant himself. The transfers involving Manafort and the other companies took place between May 2005 and September 2017. The bank reports said that media investigations had revealed Manafort’s ties to Russian-connected Ukrainian officials and suspected money laundering. JPMorgan Chase also noted suspicions “concerning the source of funds” involved in the transactions and referred in its report to newspaper articles detailing Manafort’s alleged “off-the-books payments from a pro-Russian political party.”
A FinCEN “research summary” describes additional transfers taking place in 2012 and 2013 via JPMorgan Chase to companies controlled by Manafort and his business partner Richard Gates, who later pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the U.S. The transfers included more than $3.1 million sent by Lucicle Consultants Ltd., identified in a 2018 FBI interview of Gates as one of several Cyprus-based firms that received political consulting payments from a pro-Russia Ukrainian political party led by Yanukovych. Lucicle sent money to a remodeling company hired to renovate Manafort’s vacation house and his children’s homes, to a home-improvement business in Florida and to Manafort’s New York consulting firm, the FinCEN report says. FinCEN wrote that “a continual lack of transparency” was the reason why JPMorgan Chase reported the transfers as suspicious, according to the research summary.
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