Meni jebilo sumnjivo zasto je imenovao Puula Manaforta za savjetnika prije koji mjesec,zasto bas tako sumnjivu osobu pored tolikog izbora od Republikanskih think-tankova itd.
Evo nesto i o njemu:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... st-clients
Evo jedan dio o operacijama u Ukrajini:
Manafort’s work in Ukraine began in 2005 for the country’s leading oligarch, steel and mining billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, and led to a multi-year stint advising ousted president Yanukovych, an ally of the oligarch. For at least a few years, Manafort’s Ukraine work earned him in the low seven figures annually, according to a person familiar with his operation in Ukraine. Manafort’s team in Ukraine at various times included some American operatives, such as Gates, and Konstantin Kilimnik, a former official with the International Republican Institute in Moscow, said the source familiar with the Ukraine work. Manafort has been credited with helping to reshape Yanukovych’s image to make him a more appealing candidate in 2010 by, among other things, getting him to speak Ukrainian instead of Russian, which he had done in past campaigns. Both before and after his 2010 victory, sources say that Manafort would meet periodically with high-level officials in the US embassy in Kiev and often tout Yanukovych’s pro-free market and pro-business views with an eye to buffing his image. Manafort’s job wasn’t easy, say people familiar with Yanukovych. “His client was somebody who had a very troubled reputation,” said former Bush State Department official David Kramer.
In 2008, Manafort teamed up with real estate executive Brad Zackson, who was a top aide to Trump’s father Fred, and others in a real estate scheme to buy prime properties in the US, including the famed Drake Hotel site in New York, and elsewhere, mainly on behalf of Ukrainian gas billionaire Firtash, another backer of Yanukovych. No deals were ever completed; in 2011 a civil racketeering suit that alleged money laundering in excess of $25m was filed against Firtash, Manafort and several affiliated companies by then jailed Ukrainian political opposition leader and Firtash business competitor Yulia Tymoshenko. But a New York court dismissed the charges on procedural and jurisdictional grounds.
Like Yanukovych, Firtash had a troubled reputation. Former US ambassador William Taylor said in a secret memo from 2008 that in a meeting he had with him, Firtash “acknowledged ties to Russian organized crime figure Semyon Mogilevich, stating that he had needed Mogilevich’s approval to get into business in the first place”.
The ties that Manafort had with Firtash – which included three meetings in 2008, according to documents that were part of the lawsuit – in their abortive real estate ventures involved a maze of companies and solicitations of investors with dubious backgrounds. One key example: a private equity company called Pericles Emerging Markets Partners, which Manafort helped set up with funding from Russian investors. A principal one, an informed source says, was aluminum oligarch and Putin favorite Deripaska, who at the time was barred from entering the US due to concerns about organized crime links.
According to a 2014 Cayman Islands court filing, the Russian investors charged in a petition that about $26m they had invested with the Cayman-based Pericles – via an offshore entity in Cyprus that the Russians controlled – to acquire a Ukrainian cable TV company and an internet venture was unaccounted for by Manafort and his partner Gates. The court petition from the Russian entity in Cyprus (known as Surf Horizons) said that the two men had failed to reply to requests for information since 2011 about the status of their Ukrainian investment – which was slated to be sold off – and that Manafort and Gates had “disappeared”.
The court filing shows that Surf Horizon was seeking to recover as much of its investment as possible through a liquidation of Pericles. The court quickly issued a ruling in favor of the Russian investors to help them recoup funding by putting Pericles into liquidation. As Yahoo News reported, the Cayman court sought discovery from a federal court in Virginia, which ordered Manafort, Gates and others to give depositions in the US about Pericles and the Ukrainian investments in 2015; Hibey, Manafort’s attorney, told the Guardian that his client and others had complied last year and there had been no further requests in the US. in the states.
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