In the New York Times’s recent report on Trump aide Paul Manafort’s possibly illegal payoffs from pro-Russian interests in Ukraine, there’s this curious detail:
Per the Washington Post, Manafort got $7.5 million for orchestrating this nearly $19 million deal, which seems like a disproportionate amount of money relative to the size of the initial investment. Allegedly, the money from the TV deal was to be the first of a series of investments in a private equity firm set up by Manafort in the Cayman Islands. In 2008, Deripaska sued Manafort in the Cayman Islands because the money had not been invested. The case dragged on, and the Cayman Islands pursued it in federal court, where Manafort was questioned.
]
Also worth noting: Deripaska is barred from traveling to the United States because of supposed ties to organized crime. So why was Manafort doing business with Deripaska, and why would Manafort seemingly be so foolish as to rob a mobster of millions of dollars?
On Twitter, Andrew Trabulsi, author of Warlords, Inc.: Black Markets, Broken States, and the Rise of the Warlord Entrepreneur,raises an interesting possibility: the lawsuit is money laundering hiding in plain sight. The following is pulled from Trabulsi’s Twitter thread directly, but I’ve formatted it to make it readable (and “org” is shorthand for “organized”):
Again, this is all speculation. But the recent revelations surrounding Manafort’s dealings in Ukraine do raise many questions about whether his dealings were legal.
