Paul Manafort. AP Photo/Matt Rourke A pro-Russian political party in Ukraine advised by Donald Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort, designated $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments for Manafort between 2007-12, according to secret ledgers uncovered by an anticorruption center in Kiev and obtained by The New York Times.

While there is no evidence that Manafort has actually received the earmarked payments, he is "among those names on the list of so-called 'black accounts of the Party of Regions,' which the detectives of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine are investigating," according to a statement from the bureau provided to The Times.

The Party of Regions is the political party led by the Russian-backed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych before he was driven out of power in 2014 and exiled to southern Russia.

It is unclear what exactly the series of 22 payments designated for Manafort were for. Manafort advised Yanukovych for nearly a decade and is widely credited with rehabiliting the Ukrainian leader's image between 2004-2010, but his total compensation for that work remains unclear.

Yanukovych won the 2010 presidential campaign after a failed bid in 2004.

"It was a weird thing for the people in Ukraine, because they could not imagine how an American strategist agreed to cooperate with Putin’s friend. It was confusing. But Manafort played a decisive role in the victory of Yanukovych," Ukrainian political expert Oleg Kravchenko told Politifact in May.

Paul Manafort, senior aide to Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump, waves goodbye to reporters after Trump delivered a foreign policy speech at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, United States, April 27, 2016. REUTERS/Jim Bourg The newly reported payments shed light on the "very dirty cash economy in Ukraine" that rewards party loyalists with off-the-books gifts and favors, Daria N. Kaleniuk, the executive director of the Anticorruption Action Center in Kiev, told The Times.

Other uncovered records, moreover, "give no indication that Manafort has formally dissolved the local [Ukrainian] branch of his company, Davis Manafort International," The Times notes.

Manafort released a statement early Monday morning denying The Times' findings and reiterating that he had not received any cash payments from elements within the Russian or Ukrainian governments.

"All of the political payments directed toward me were for my entire political team," the statement read. "There is no evidence of 'cash payments' made to me by any official in Ukraine."

This is not the first time Manafort has been accused of trying to take advantage of Ukraine's corrupt political environment for financial gain.

Manafort also attempted to set up an offshore real-estate partnership with Dmitry Firtash, a notorious Ukrainian businessman who donated to Yanukovych's pro-Russia political party, according to documents uncovered in 2014. Firtash is wanted by the FBI on bribery charges.

Manafort has also worked with the Russian oligarch and Putin ally Oleg Deripaska on investment deals in New York and Ukraine, The Guardian reported. Most recently, Manafort and Deripaska were involved in a partnership to buy millions of dollars worth of assets in Ukraine and Eastern Europe via an investment fund Manafort co-founded, Pericles Emerging Markets.

Deripaska has been linked to organized Russian crime by the State Department, according to the Times.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, left; Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko; and Ukraine Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych. REUTERS/Andrey Mosienko "Someone who has had such close relations with notorious kleptocrats doesn't belong anywhere near any of our presidential candidates," Charles Davidson, executive director of the Kleptocracy Initiative at Hudson Institute, told Bloomberg's Eli Lake in April.

The Times report comes amid increased scrutiny of the Trump campaign's ties to Russia, which exploded late last month after a hack of Democratic National Committee email accounts was tied to Russian military intelligence. Trump denied any involvement in the hack, but called on Russian hackers to "find the 30,000 emails [from Hillary Clinton] that are missing" in a now infamous press conference.

Revelations about the origins of the DNC hack and Manafort's cash ties to pro-Russian interests in Ukraine also follow the Trump campaign's decision to alter the GOP's policy on Ukraine, which has long called for arming Ukrainian soldiers against pro-Russian rebels.

The report, moreover, emerges in light of Trump's own perceived friendliness toward Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. Trump has threatened more than once to pull out of NATO — an organization Russia views as a threat — and has spoken highly of Putin more than once.

"He's running his country, and at least he's a leader, unlike what we have in this country," Trump told MSNBC in December.

On Thursday, Trump told CNBC that during his administration, he would "be friendly with Putin."

Some have said the real-estate mogul is not releasing his tax returns because they may show that "he is deeply involved in dealing with Russian oligarchs," conservative columnist George Will told Fox News late last month.

Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, Robby Mook, in a statement on Monday morning in response to the Times report, called for Trump to "disclose campaign chair Paul Manafort's and all other campaign employees' and advisers' ties to Russian or pro-Kremlin entities, including whether any of Trump's employees or advisers are currently representing and/or being paid by them."

As journalist Julia Ioffe noted in a recent piece for Foreign Policy, Trump's own influence among high-level Russian figures may be overstated given the difficulty that he has had throughout his career in securing lucrative real-estate projects there.

In any case, along with Manafort's ties to pro-Russian actors in Ukraine, Trump's seemingly shady financial overtures to Russian oligarchs have resurfaced this year, perhaps as evidence that the real-estate mogul or his top advisers may be tangentially linked to Russian attempts to undermine the Clinton campaign.