You're reading: Mueller: Manafort secretly paid top European politicians to lobby for Yanukovych

Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted Paul Manafort, former U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign manager and long-time adviser to Ukrainian politicians, for secretly paying former European politicians who lobbied on behalf of Ukraine, according to a new indictment released on Feb. 23.

The indictment came just hours after Rick Gates, Manafort long-term business partner, pleaded guilty to perjury and conspiring to defraud the U.S. government and agreed to cooperate with investigators.

It is adding to the pile of charges that Mueller issued in the nine months that he’s been overseeing the investigation into possible links between Trump’s campaign and the Russian government. Already, 19 people and three companies have been indicted. Four people, including Gates, pleaded guilty, but Manafort affirms his innocence.

Manafort, who managed Trump campaign for several months in 2016, is thought to be a key connection between the campaign and Russia due to his earlier political work in the region.

He was first indicted by Mueller in October for conspiracy against the U.S., conspiracy to launder money, acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign principal and failing to file reports of foreign accounts. He surrendered to the U.S Federal Bureau of Investigation and was placed under house arrest.

The new indictment lists similar charges but has new and more detailed information about Manafort’s activities, including his offshore financial operations and secret lobbying on behalf of the Ukrainian government.

It describes in detail a sprawling lobbying scheme set by Manafort in the interests of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych and his Party of Regions in 2006-2014.

Yanukovych was ousted by the EuroMaidan Revolution in 2014 after he refused to sign an association deal with the European Union. He fled to Russia, where he’s been living ever since.

But in Yanukovych’s times of glory, he commissioned Manafort with setting up a vast scheme to whitewash the image of his regime.

‘Hapsburg Group’

As part of the lobbying scheme, Manafort paid at least 2 million euros through offshore accounts to the highly influential European politicians for pretending to be independent voices supporting the Yanukovych government in 2012-2013, reads the indictment.

The politicians, known informally as “Hapsburg Group,” were to pretend to be giving independent assessments of Ukrainian government’s work, while actually they were paid to lobby for it, including in the U.S.

Manafort explained in “the eyes only memorandum,” created in June 2012, that the purpose of creating “Super VIP effort would be to assemble a small group of highly influential European champions and politically credible friends, who can act informally and without any visible relationship with Ukraine’s government.”

The group was managed by an unnamed former European chancellor in coordination with Manafort, the indictment reads.

Unnamed chancellor

Several publications alleged that the unnamed chancellor could be Alfred Gusenbauer, who served as the chancellor of Austria in 2007-2008.

Gusenbauer had worked with Mercury LLC, a U.S.-based lobbying firm hired by the European Center for Modern Ukraine.

The center was a Brussels-based nonprofit set up by Manafort and Gates for lobbying purposes.

As part of his work for the European Center for Modern Ukraine, Gusenbauer was part of Mercury’s meeting with three members of the U.S. Congress in 2013, according to the FARA disclosure form filed by the
firm.

Upon the release of the indictment, Gusebauer told the Wiener Zeitung that he never engaged in lobbying the interests of Yanukovych.

Gusenbauer is now a member of a Berlin-based think tank Dialog of Civilizations, Deutsche Welle reported on Feb. 23. One of its founders, Russian politician Vladimir Yakunin, was placed on the international sanctions list the U.S. imposed in 2014 following Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

Another former European chancellor that could fit the role is ex-German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, who left the office in 2005 and is closely tied to Kremlin.

Schroder, who once called Putin a “flawless democrat,” in 2017 became the head of the Russian state Gazprom’s Nord Stream 2, a pipeline that, when constructed, will deliver Russian gas to Europe bypassing Ukraine.

Manafort allegedly tried to influence the investigation against him by ghostwriting a whitewashing op-ed about himself that was later submitted to the Kyiv Post by his Ukrainian acquaintance Oleg Voloshyn in December.

Proxy NGO

In November, the Kyiv Post wrote about the European Center for Modern Ukraine that has become a part of the indictment’s allegations of Manafort and Gates being unregistered foreign agents in the U.S.

Manafort and Gates were operating on behalf of the center that was based in Brussels.

The center’s founder, former Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Leonid Kozhara, declined to comment but told 112 TV channel on Nov. 1 that the center was created “to tell the truth about Ukraine in the European Parliament and other E.U. institutions. And the center was quite successful.”

One of the center’s apparent functions was to pay U.S. journalists and bloggers for favorable coverage.

A 2013 Buzzfeed investigation revealed that the center paid U.S. bloggers at the U.S. far-right website Breitbart News Network, among other outlets, for positive coverage of the ruling Party of Regions during the 2012 parliamentary elections