Russian Manafort client open to Congress talks
WASHINGTON — A Russian billionaire close to President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday he is willing to take part in U.S. congressional hearings to discuss his past business relationship with President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.
Last week, The Associated Press reported that Manafort had written aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska in 2005, proposing to do work for Deripaska that would “benefit the Putin Government.” The story was based on interviews with people familiar with Deripaska’s business dealings with Manafort and documents obtained by the AP, including strategy memoranda, contracts and records showing international wire transfers for millions of dollars.
In a quarter-page advertisement in Tuesday’s editions of The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, Deripaska said he was “ready to take part in any hearings conducted in the US Congress on this subject in order to defend my reputation and name.”
Manafort signed a $10 million contract in 2006 that laid out a four-country communications and political strategy intended to support Deripaska’s company and undermine anti-Russian political movements. Payments continued until at least 2009, seven years before Manafort joined and led Trump’s 2016 campaign, according to people familiar with the relationship. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the business arrangement openly.
In his newspaper ads responding to the AP’s story, Deripaska said he never signed “a $10 million contract ‘to greatly benefit the Putin Government’ with Paul Manafort.”
“I have never made any commitments or contracts with the obligation or purpose to covertly promote or advance ‘Putin’s Government’ interests anywhere in the world,” Deripaska wrote.
The AP’s story said that Manafort wrote a strategy memo proposing that the work he would do for Deripaska would “benefit the Putin Government,” not that the contract contained that language.
“This AP Exclusive report falls into the negative context of current US-Russian relations and causes fresh unfair and unjustified concerns and alarm in the US Congress about Russian involvement in US domestic affairs,” Deripaska’s ad said.
The AP stands by its reporting, spokeswoman Lauren Easton said.
The revelations about Manafort come as Trump campaign advisers are the subject of an FBI probe and two congressional investigations, and they appear to guarantee that Manafort will be sought as a key witness in upcoming hearings. He has volunteered to appear.
Investigators are reviewing whether the Trump campaign and its associates coordinated with Moscow to meddle in the 2016 campaign. Manafort has dismissed the investigations as politically motivated and misguided. The documents obtained by AP show Manafort’s ties to Russia were closer than previously revealed.
Deripaska is one of Russia’s wealthiest men. He amassed his fortune under Putin and has bought assets abroad in ways widely perceived to benefit the Kremlin’s interests. U.S. diplomatic cables from 2006 described him as “among the 2-3 oligarchs Putin turns to on a regular basis” and “a more-or-less permanent fixture on Putin’s trips abroad.”