Politically motivated He used his response to criticise the newspaper, nicknamed the “failing New York Times” by Mr Trump, claiming its report was politically motivated and alleging that it had chosen not to scrutinise ties between Hillary Clinton’s family charity, the Clinton Foundation, and the state department.
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4 Manafort has parlayed political relationships around the world into an array of intricate financial transactions with billionaire oligarchs and other controversial investors that have at times spurred legal disputes.
“The suggestion that I accepted cash payments is unfounded, non-sensical and silly”, the statement says, according to NBC News.
Paul Manafort, manager of Donald Trump’s increasingly chaotic campaign, may become just the sort of distraction that Trump, for all his vaunted loyalty, refuses to tolerate.
Manafort’s name appears 22 times in 400 pages of handwritten Cyrillic taken from ledgers found at the headquarters of Yanukovych’s Regions Party, the Times said.
Ukrainian investigators do not know whether Manafort received the payments laid out in the ledger, but believe they were part of an “illegal off-the-books system”, the Times reported. I have never received a single off-the-books cash payment, nor have I ever done work for the governments of Ukraine or Russian Federation.
Mr Manafort, the Republican presidential nominee’s campaign manager, vehemently denied any wrongdoing, saying he had never received the payments.??
Svitlana Olifira, a spokeswoman for Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau, confirmed that the documents were recovered, but cautioned that the investigation was in its early stages. As Trump has been doing of late, Manafort also accused the news media of covering the campaign unfairly.
In his statement to NBC, Manafort insists he has not done any work for the governments of Ukraine or Russian Federation, without detailing his work on behalf of Yanukovych’s political party.
He said any payments he received were for a broader political campaign team that included local and global staff, polling and research.
Manafort was also linked to being in relations with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, president of the world’s largest aluminum company and a man known to keep close relations to Vladimir Putin. “I’d like to have them released”.
Donald Trump’s campaign chair, Paul Manafort, has denied allegations made in a 14 August 2016 New York Times report that $12.7 million in “off the books” cash payments were made to him from a pro-Russia political party in the Ukraine.
Ukraine officials are yet to launch an investigation against Manafort, mainly because they can not confirm that he actually received the money, even if his name appears a couple of times on the document. 3 Manafort’s lobbying clientele included two corrupt dictators, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, both of whom stole billions of dollars from their countries.
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Trump then appeared to contradict himself when George Stephanopoulos, the host of the program, responded that “he’s already there, isn’t he?”
