Star witness against Manafort admits embezzling, hiding accounts
ALEXANDRIA, Virginia — Rick Gates, a longtime business associate of US President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, on Monday testified that he helped Manafort file false tax returns and hide his foreign bank accounts.
Gates, in hours of hugely anticipated testimony, calmly acknowledged having embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars from Manafort and said the two had committed crimes together by stashing money in foreign bank accounts and falsifying bank loan documents.
Manafort and Gates were the first two people indicted in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into potential ties between Russia and the Trump campaign. But Gates pleaded guilty months later and agreed to cooperate in Mueller’s investigation of Manafort, the only US citizen charged by the special counsel to opt for trial instead of a guilty plea.
Gates, who first met Manafort working for him as an intern fresh out of college, has been described by witnesses as Manafort’s right-hand man in his multimillion-dollar political consulting business.
He was expected to continue testifying for several hours on Tuesday and is expected to face a bruising cross-examination as defense lawyers try to undercut his credibility and pin the blame on him.
His testimony, giv- en in short, clipped answers as Manafort rarely broke his gaze from the witness stand, follows that of vendors who detailed Manafort’s luxurious spending and financial professionals who told jurors how the defendant hid millions of dollars in offshore accounts.
Gates, who is awaiting sentencing, told jurors that he siphoned off the money without Manafort’s knowledge by filing false expense reports. He also admitted to concealing millions of dollars in foreign bank accounts on Manafort’s behalf and to falsifying loan applications and other documents to help Manafort obtain more in bank loans.
“At Mr Manafort’s request, we did not disclose foreign bank accounts,” Gates told the jury in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia.
Gates, who also served in a senior role in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, read off the names of more than a dozen shell companies he and Manafort set up in Cyprus, St Vincent and the Grenadines and the United Kingdom to stash the proceeds of Manafort’s Ukrainian political consulting work.
Prosecutors said Manafort used those companies to stash millions of dollars, proceeds he omitted year after year from his income tax returns. Later, they say, when that income dwindled, Manafort launched a different scheme, shoring up his struggling finances by using doctored documents to obtain millions more in bank loans.
The criminal case has nothing to do with either man’s work for the Trump campaign and there’s been no discussion during the trial about whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia — the central question Mueller’s team has tried to answer.
But Trump has shown interest in the proceedings, tweeting support for Manafort and suggesting he had been treated worse than gangster Al Capone.
On Friday, a tax preparer named Cindy Laporta admitted that she helped disguise $900,000 in foreign income as a loan to reduce Manafort’s tax burden.