Paul Manafort's Activities in Ukraine Were Even Shadier Than We Thought. And That's Pretty Damn Shady.

Now that Paul Manafort apparently has found the proper key in which to sing with Robert Mueller's ever-expanding canary chorale, we can take a step back and study properly the very strange—and extremely corrupt—ways in which Manafort kept himself in vacation homes and ostrich jackets during his fat years. Over the weekend, The New York Times ran a fascinating account of one of Manafort's suckers in Ukraine.

“Sometimes it seems fun,” Mr. Kaseyev, a 34-year-old hairdresser, said with a shrug during an interview. “I’m a secret millionaire.” Until the authorities came calling, that is, seeking $30 million in back taxes.

I take his point. That does not sound like fun at all.

One of the people who did business with a company opened under Mr. Kaseyev’s stolen identity didn’t mean anything to him. But the name certainly caught the eye of investigators in the United States: Paul J. Manafort. Mr. Manafort, who worked for a decade as a political consultant in Ukraine before becoming chairman of the Trump campaign in 2016, made a deal worth hundreds of thousands of dollars with the shell company under the hairdresser’s name. It was called Neocom Systems Limited, according to a Ukrainian lawmaker.

It seems that, in one of his more successful international scams, Manafort would steal someone's identity, use it to set up a shell company, and then park tens of millions of dollars in the company's accounts. Then, one day, without warning, a Ukrainian hairdresser, say, gets a knock on his door because he owes $30 million in back taxes through his work as a member of the board of directors of a company he's never heard of in his life.

“It’s a frequent problem,” Daria Kalenyuk, chief of the Anticorruption Action Center here, said of the directors, who stand to take the fall if prosecutors investigate. Sometimes the directors are lawyers or victims of identity theft, she said.

Either that, or Manafort and his kleptocratic clients simply would roll a drunk.

But usually “it’s people who are either alcoholics or in poor health, and who simply sell their passports for about $20.” One of the risks to this scheme is that the fake directors might try to claim the millions held in their names. But Ms. Kalenyuk could not recall one instance of such a claim. “You need to have some knowledge and education to know how to do that,” she said, in the tax havens like Cyprus or the British Virgin Islands, where such companies are typically established...

Some homeless men have achieved a measure of fame among activists who track corruption in the former Soviet states because they pop up so often at the head of multimillion dollar companies. One man identified in the Ukrainian media as a homeless Latvian named Erik Vanagels has been listed as the owner of hundreds of companies in Britain, Cyprus, Ireland, New Zealand, Panama and elsewhere. Companies in the network also helped finance the private zoo and sprawling estate of the former Ukrainian president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, who was the main client of Mr. Manafort.

This, I would point out, again, is the guy who was the president*'s campaign manager, and the guy who arranged for Mike Pence to be the vice president. Personally, I'd rather the homeless Latvian was president.

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Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.