Manafort Tried To Partner On Real Estate Deal With A Putin Ally And A Russian Mafia Boss
A failed $850 million New York City real estate deal offers important insights to Manafort’s Russia connections.
Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort has been in the news quite a bit lately. It was revealed last week that in late July FBI agents raided Manafort’s home. And now we are getting more details about a shady real estate deal that Manafort was part of several years ago.
Manafort partnered with a Russian Oligarch, Oleg Deripaska who is close to Vladimir Putin, and a member of Russian organized crime, Dmitry Firtash, on a failed $850 million real estate deal in New York, according to The Daily Beast.
As The Daily Beast notes, The Justice Department is seeking the extradition of Firtash, so he can stand trial for a 2013 racketeering indictment in a Chicago federal court. Firtash has been “identified by United States law enforcement as two upper-echelon associates of Russian organized crime.”
Dmitry Firtash is also connected to Paul Manafort through his role a key financier of the Party of Regions in Ukraine. You will remember the Party of Regions as the pro-Russia political party that Manafort did year of consulting work for.
Firtash’s connection with Manafort in the attempted purchase of the Drake Hotel has been reported before.
But the role of Oleg Deripaska is a new development in the story.
In 2006, Deripaska signed a $10 million annual contract with Manafort for what Manafort pitched, in a secret memo, as political and economic efforts inside the U.S. to “greatly benefit the Putin Government.”
According to The Daily Beast, Manafort, Firtash and Deripaska planned to purchase the Drake and convert it into a luxury office and residential space called Bulgari Tower.
Manafort’s deal with Firtash and Deripaska is expected to be a focus of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.
Read the full report by The Daily Beast here.
[image via Wikipedia/NBC screenshot]
