To some of U.S. President Donald Trump’s entourage, it’s “the conspiracy of the black ledger.”
They’re convinced that the exposure of Paul Manafort’s secret payments in Ukraine was part of a scenario to destroy Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign by tarring Manafort, who was then Trump’s campaign manager. Manafort was quickly removed from the campaign after not even serving the entire summer, while Trump’s conspiracy theorists have to this day seized on the black ledger — which they regard as fake — to advance the fiction that Ukraine conspired to keep Trump from the White House. Manafort is now serving a 7.5-year prison sentence for tax and bank fraud, partly stemming from $12.7 million in payments from Ukraine.
I want Ukrainian citizens, American politicians, and international journalists to operate with the first-hand information and not be victims of random claims or deliberate misinformation.
Here’s the true story as I know it:
What is the black ledger?
Ukraine’s fourth president, Viktor Yanukovych (2010-2014), was completely corrupt. He was operating through bribery always and everywhere. Former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, in his memoir, recalls how Yanukovych, visiting an international summit as Ukraine’s president, shared a story about what he thought was a witty solution to a problem. In order to formally take ownership of his luxurious residence near Kyiv, which turned into a museum of corruption after his escape, Yanukovych paid a bribe to a judge. However, in order to teach him a lesson, the bribe was paid in small-denomination banknotes, forcing the judge to spend a lot of time counting money.
Accounting for money within the criminal organization of Yanukovych was carried out in a primitive way. Payments were written in a special book. Perhaps the idea was that a paper document was safer because it can’t be stolen by hacking into the computer and law enforcement officers won’t find it if they seize equipment during a search.
This book is called the black ledger and Trump people believe that it is fake.
One of the key proponents of this theory is Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph Giuliani, who attacked me personally more than once. In an interview with Fox in May, he claimed that I was convicted in Ukraine for interfering in the U.S. election, and that black ledger itself was fake.
It wasn’t just a set of lies, but it also cost me a potential post in the administration of President Volodymyr Zelensky, whom I had been helping with his presidential election campaign. After Giuliani branded me “an enemy of the United States,” I became too toxic to hold an official post.
The black ledger is a handwritten manuscript that was securely guarded – it was stored in a specially equipped room behind an armored door on the second floor of the office of the Yanukovych’s party headquarters that was only a five-minute walk from parliament. This was established by Ukrainian law enforcement officers during interrogations of mid-level employees of the party’s office.
The investigation in Ukraine found that there were several people making most of the records in the book, including the payments to Manafort. One of them was Vitaly Kalyuzhny, who before coming to politics worked as an informational technology engineer for one of the stakeholders of the Yanukovych clan. Kalyuzhny fled from Ukraine after the regime of Yanukovych fell.
The second main author of the black ledger is Yevhen Geller, a former member of parliament close to Yanukovych. After Yanukovych fled Ukraine, Geller joined the team of another oligarch, billionaire Ihor Kolomoisky.
In the last days of Yanukovych’s reign in February 2014, a fire occurred in the office of the Party of Regions in Kyiv. There is every reason to believe that the black ledger was taken out of there during that fire. We don’t know where the book was kept for the next several years.
In February 2016, I received an envelope, sent to my mailbox in parliament. It contained 22 pages of what we later called the black ledger. The pages listed payments, presumably bribes, to different politicians in 2012. The receivers included the circle of then-President Viktor Yushchenko, who positioned himself as an opponent of Yanukovych and defeated him during the Orange Revolution five years earlier.
However, there was not a word about Manafort in these 22 pages. Together with my aide, we tried to contact people who were indicated as senders on the envelope, but we were told that these people don’t live at the indicated address. Besides, at that time, I was focused on exposing corrupt officials of the current government.
In truth, I did not know how reliable the 22 pages I received were, and I was in no hurry to publish them because I did not have a complete picture. It became clear three months later, in May 2016 when media published an interview with Viktor Trepak, former deputy head of the Security Service of Ukraine, who said that he had found at his doorstep a complete “black ledger” of Yanukovych’s party, which totaled 800 pages and covered the time from 2007 to 2012.
Then I realized that what I had was a small part of this ledger. On May 31, 2016, I gave a press conference and released the 22 pages that I had. Again, Manafort was not mentioned there. His role became known only three months later, in August 2016, when the New York Times reported about it.
In Ukraine, it was no secret to anyone that Manafort worked for Yanukovych and was generously paid. And since Manafort at that time became the head of Trump’s campaign, it was predictable enough that American journalists would dig for Manafort’s name in Yanukovych’s black ledger.
According to my information, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, or NABU, gave confirmation that Manafort was mentioned in Yanukovych’s black ledger to two Western journalists at the same time: Andrew Kramer of the New York Times and a journalist of a British newspaper who was unable to publish a sensational investigation on time because of the strict libel legislation in the U.K.
Four days after the New York Times’ article, on Aug. 18, 2016, NABU officially issued a statement stating that Manafort was mentioned 22 times in the black ledger, receiving a total of $12.7 million from the party. And a day later, on Aug. 19, I held another press conference in Kyiv, and by the end of the day, it was announced that Manafort resigned as the head of Trump’s campaign.
Moreover, as we know from Bob Woodward’s book “Fear,” Manafort’s resignation was almost a settled matter even before the black ledger was published. One of the main sponsors of the campaign, the Mercer family, was dissatisfied with the way he conducted the campaign. And the publication of the black ledger simply became the last straw.
Manafort himself told Steve Bannon that he knew that his name was in Yanukovych’s black ledger two months before it was announced – that is, at the beginning of summer of 2016. I didn’t know he was in there at the time. Therefore, the answer to the question of who informed him that he was in the book can shed light on who was secretly in control of these events.
A print screen from an FBI search warrant details payments from Ukraine’s ex-Party of Regions, led by ousted President Viktor Yanukovych, to his consultant Paul Manafort.
FBI authenticates payments in the black ledger
Six months later, in February 2017, the head of the company that rented Manafort’s former office in Kyiv on 4 Sofiyska Street contacted me. According to him, they found a keyless safe in the office and received permission from the owner of the premises to open it. At that time, law enforcers were often raiding IT companies in Ukraine, and new tenants wanted to make sure that nothing forbidden was stored in the safe.
What they found in the safe was a motley pile of documents.
There was an application form and a school report card for the daughter of Konstantin Kilimnik, Manafort’s right-hand man, prepared for an application to Salem, a private school in Germany. There were also two expired credit cards of Phil Griffin and Leonid Avrashov, employees of Manafort. There was a CD with translation into English of Ukrainian news from two years ago and statements with original signatures of Yanukovych and his deputies.
But the most important document in the safe was a contract and an invoice for transferring $750,000 to the account of Manafort in Wachovia Bank, Virginia, on Oct. 14, 2009. The money was transferred from the account of an offshore company Neocom Systems Limited (Belize) with a bank in Kyrgyzstan. According to the documents, the money was a payment for 501 computers that Manafort allegedly sold to this company. As the investigation established, the company was opened in the name of a Kyiv hairdresser, who said he lost his passport.
The same amount for the same date is listed in the black ledger of the Party of Regions as payment for Manafort.
I handed over these documents to one of the FBI agents who stayed in Kyiv as part of the bureau’s cooperation with the NABU. Three weeks later, I published the documents. In the spring of this year, two years later, these documents were returned to me by another FBI agent, and I handed them to the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine.
Recently, the Daily Beast published FBI documents that confirmed that the same amount of $750,000 was indeed transferred to Manafort’s account with Wachovia Bank around the time of Oct. 15, 2009. In this connection, the FBI asked the court to allow a search of the storage space that Manafort used to store documents. There were also other confirmed transfers to Manafort from the Kyrgyz account of the same company, Neocom Systems Limited, for $2.5 million.
Thus, the authenticity of the black ledger was confirmed by reconciling the amounts in it with transfers to Manafort’s account in the U.S.
One of the misconceptions of American politicians is that Manafort is the main thing in this black ledger. But the black ledger is not about American politics. It is about transnational corruption and how political influence in Ukraine was being purchased. Therefore, when trying to cast a shadow on the story of Manafort’s activities in Ukraine, some American politicians unwittingly undermine the entire array of documents that are a testimony to how Ukrainians were robbed. By doing so, American politicians indirectly justify the multi-billion dollar crimes of the exiled Kremlin-backed Yanukovych. And this is one of the worst treatments of Ukraine one could expect.
This is the chronology of events as it was.
Criticisms of Manafort
My only mistake in this story I consider my caustic comments about Manafort in 2016, which were caused by my emotional hostility towards Manafort as the chief engineer of the Yanukovych regime in Ukraine.
The same mistake was made by many Ukrainian politicians, such as former Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and current Interior Minister Arsen Avakov. However, all these comments were made publicly on social media, and there was no web of intrigue and collusion, as some American politicians are trying to paint it.
Obviously, Ukraine needs bipartisan support of the U.S. Where we need this support the most is the fight against corruption in Ukraine. Decades of corruption not only led to the loss of huge funds, but also weakened our country in the face of Russian aggression, and led to the decline of the army and patriotism, which allowed Russian President Vladimir Putin to carry out his cunning plans in 2014 — seizing Crimea and invading the eastern Donbas, putting 7 percent of Ukrainian territory under his control.
Today, Ukraine is following a winding path of reform, but one can’t deny its achievements in the past year. Today, my country needs U.S. support as acutely as ever.
Sergii Leshchenko, a Kyiv Post columnist, is an investigative journalist and former member of Ukraine’s parliament.
