Saturday, October 13, 2018

In Manafort’s World, Everyone Had A Price

For the first few months Paul Manafort worked in Ukraine, his home was a luxury hotel in downtown Donetsk – the Donbass Palace. There, on assignment for local tycoon Rinat Akhmetov in early 2005, Manafort would work from the room, reached by associates via the hotel telephone.
But when an Ukrainska Pravda reporter called through to his room, Manafort hung up, refusing to talk to the reporter, who later described him in a story as “famous for an indiscriminate assortment of clients.”

As history has since shown, by that time Manafort was already winding up his work with this broad “assortment of clients,” focusing instead on one. From then on, Manafort would work for the Party of Regions, burnishing the image of then-Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine and in Western capitals while running errands for the party’s wealthy backers around the world.
Documents from the court cases that have dogged Manafort since then, and interviews with those who encountered him during this period, tell a markedly different story about his time in Ukraine than has previously been portrayed. He comes off as a man intimately acquainted with post-Soviet dealmaking, leading him to break the law in running an illegal pro-Western lobbying campaign to convince the European Union to sign an Association Agreement with Ukraine.

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