Donald Trump’s former campaign manager owed pro-Russian interests as much as $17 million before he joined the president’s election team, it was alleged last night.
Paul Manafort’s debts were apparently revealed in financial records kept in Cyprus, a tax haven popular with Russia’s oligarchs, which were obtained by The New York Times.
The suggestion that he may have been heavily indebted to Russian-linked parties is certain to be probed by congressional and federal investigations into the Kremlin’s alleged efforts to tilt the US election. Mr Manafort, a veteran Washington player who has been under FBI scrutiny for months, has consistently denied any wrongdoing.
He and Donald Trump Jr, Mr Trump’s eldest son, have been called to testify about alleged Russian meddling in the election in front of the Senate judiciary committee next Wednesday. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, will appear at a closed-door session of the Senate intelligence committee on Monday.
Mr Manafort’s debts appeared to be owed by companies linked to his activities in Ukraine, where he worked for several years as a consultant to Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Moscow president who was ousted in 2014.
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One financial statement for a Cyprus shell company, Lucicle Consultants, showed a $9.9 million loan to a company based in the state of Delaware that was allegedly connected to Mr Manafort.
A spokesman for Mr Manafort did not dispute that the debts might have once existed but told The New York Times that the records were “stale and do not purport to reflect any current financial arrangements.”
The spokesman added: “The broader point, which Mr Manafort has maintained from the beginning, is that he did not collude with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election.”
Separately, Mr Trump said yesterday that he would not have appointed Jeff Sessions as attorney-general had he known that Mr Sessions would remove himself from investigations involving Russia and the Trump campaign. Mr Sessions, who was one of Mr Trump’s earliest political supporters and who now leads the justice department, said he would step away from such enquiries after he was accused of misleading the Senate over his own contacts with a Russian ambassador.
Mr Trump last night called Mr Sessions’s decision “very unfair to the president”. He told The New York Times: “Sessions should have never recused himself and if he was going to recuse himself he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else.”
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Mr Trump added that Robert Mueller, the former FBI director now leading a special counsel investigation into election meddling, would be crossing a line if he examined the Trump family’s finances beyond any links to Russia. One great fear of the White House will be that Mr Mueller’s enquiry will evolve and branch out over time.
Mr Manafort served as campaign chairman for Mr Trump from last March until August, when he was forced to resign after a ledger was unearthed in Ukraine that suggested he had been in line for millions of dollars in payments from the pro-Russia Party of Regions.
Before he left the campaign he attended a meeting last June at which Mr Trump Jr expected to be given information that would compromise Hillary Clinton that he had been told came from a Kremlin source. It was previously claimed that Russian spies plotted to manipulate President Trump through Mr Manafort.
US intelligence appear to have overheard Russian officials who were confident that Mr Manafort’s past business ties to Mr Yanukovych, the former pro-Moscow president of Ukraine, could be used to shape Mr Trump’s thinking.
The matter of whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin is now the focus of a special counsel investigation that promises to loom over the White House for months and possibly years. Mr Trump has called the investigation the “single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history”.
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Mr Manafort had previously been linked to 15 bank accounts and ten companies in Cyprus, dating back to 2007. One of those companies was allegedly used to receive $18.9 million from Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch, according to court documents reviewed by NBC News. The money was meant to buy a media company in Ukraine. The deal failed, however, and NBC said that the money was not accounted for.
In 2006 US officials described Mr Deripaska in a diplomatic cable as “one of two to three oligarchs Putin turns to on a regular basis”.