Manafort & Gates were wired more than $30 million for their work in Ukraine [View all]

[blondebanshee]

Kypros Chrysostomides is one of Cyprus’s most elite lawyers, a wine connoisseur who boasts he was decorated by the French government and received the “Grand Cross of the Order of the Phoenix” from Greece, one of that country’s highest honors.

But to disgraced American political operative Paul Manafort, he was known as “Dr. K.,” the fix-it man.

Chrysostomides set up more than a dozen shell companies in Cyprus for Manafort and Manafort’s former associate Rick Gates. Through those companies, the two American lobbyists received payments for political consultancy work in Ukraine and wired more than $30 million, some of which was used to make various purchases in the United States, while avoiding U.S. taxes. Overall, Manafort’s companies shifted more than $75 million through offshore accounts.

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Paul Manafort, then-campaign manager for U.S. President Donald Trump, at the Republican National Convention in 2016.
Credit: ZUMA Press, Inc. / Alamy Stock Photo
Bank accounts for the shell companies that Chrysostomides created funneled payments to the United States from offshore businesses of political allies of ex-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych — whom Manafort and Gates referred to as Big Guy, or BG. The transfer requests were sent directly to Chrysostomides’ law firm in Nicosia, an address that was also the headquarters for all of the shell companies, according to Gates’ testimony at Manafort’s August 2018 trial in U.S. federal court on charges of fraud and financial crimes.


[link:https://www.occrp.org/en/investigations/the-curious-case-of-dr-k-and-mr-chrysostomides|