Page:Manafort-indictment-22Feb2018.pdf/7

 MANAFORT and GATES acted as unregistered agents of a foreign government and foreign political parties. Specifically, they represented the Government of Ukraine, the President of Ukraine (Victor Yanukovych, who was President from 2010 to 2014), the Party of Regions (a Ukrainian political party led by Yanukovych), and the Opposition Bloc (a successor to the Party of Regions after Yanukovych fled to Russia).

2. MANAFORT and GATES generated tens of millions of dollars in income as a result of their Ukraine work. From approximately 2006 through the present, MANAFORT and GATES engaged in a scheme to hide income from United States authorities, while enjoying the use of the money. During the first part of the scheme between approximately 2006 and 2015, MANAFORT, with GATES’ assistance, failed to pay taxes on this income by disguising it as alleged “loans” from nominee offshore corporate entities and by making millions of dollars in unreported payments from foreign accounts to bank accounts they controlled and United States vendors. MANAFORT also used the offshore accounts to purchase United States real estate, and MANAFORT and GATES used the undisclosed income to make improvements to and refinance their United States properties.

3. In the second part of the scheme, between approximately 2015 and at least January 2017, when the Ukraine income dwindled after Yanukovych fled to Russia, MANAFORT, with the assistance of GATES, extracted money from MANAFORT’s United States real estate by, among other things, using those properties as collateral to obtain loans from multiple financial institutions. MANAFORT and GATES fraudulently secured more than twenty million dollars in loans by falsely inflating MANAFORT’s and his company’s income and by failing to disclose existing debt in order to qualify for the loans.

4. In furtherance of the scheme, MANAFORT and GATES funneled millions of dollars in