No evidence was found by investigators to press charges against Paul Manafort, ex-chairman of the U.S president-elect Donald Trump presidential campaign, Nazar Kholodnytsky, the chief of the special anti-corruption prosecutor’s office told zn.ua news website on Nov. 18.
Manafort was suspected of involvement in shady deals with Ukraine’s Party of Regions while working as a consultant for the disbanded political bloc. Suspicion was aroused after Manafort’s name was found on the so-called “black ledger” of the Party of Regions.
But only Manafort’s last name was found in the Party of Region’s black ledger. Kholodnytsky said that investigators were unable to prove the authenticity of the signature in the ledger.
Manafort was forced to resign from his post in August amid an international scandal caused by National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine’s publication Manafort’s name in the Party of Regions black ledger. Manafort’s name appeared alongside a list of payments, sparking suspicion that he was involved in bribery.
Manafort has been working as a political campaign manager since the 1970s. He helped pro-Russian candidate Yanukovych become president of Ukraine in 2008 and during an engagement that saw him support the fled kleptocrat from 2005-2014, according to BBC Ukraine.
NABU investigators reported on their official website that a total sum of more than $12 million was allocated to Manafort since November 2007. The last mention of Manafort’s name is dated Oct. 2, 2012. However, NABU said that such a mention didn’t necessarily mean Manafort actually got the money as the signature could have belonged to anther person.
Kholodnytsky told zn.ua that he, as a prosecutor, had forbidden revealing any details of the investigation. He even filed a complaint with NABU but didn’t get an explanation on why the detectives decided to make the Manafort information public.
Poroshenko Bloc lawmaker Sergii Leshchenko and Ukrainska Pravda news website chief editor Sevgil Musayeva-Borovyk made the Manafort segment of the Party of Regions black ledger public on Aug. 19.
The NABU website reported it revealed the details about Manafort in response to numerous press requests.
“As the chief prosecutor in this case, I was very surprised when I saw the scan copies of the documents featuring Manafort published on the NABU website,” Kholodnytsky said.
The prosecutor was also not satisfied with Leshchenko and Interior Minister Arsen Avakov’s decision to spread and publish information that could have compromised the investigation.
When a zn.ua journalist asked him why there were no actual results or no notes of suspicion after almost three months of the Party of Regions black ledger investigation, Kholodnytsky explained that only Manafort’s last name is mentioned in the black ledger book, with no signature that was proved to belong to him.
“All the other signatures in the book are more or less similar to the actual figurants’ signs of the investigation, but the identity of who signed on Manafort’s behalf is still unknown. So there are no grounds to press charges against Manafort today,” said Kholodnytsky.
