Disgraced United States lobbyist Paul Manafort plotted with partners in Ukraine to rig that country’s largest telecommunications privatization deal, which would have netted him a large payoff had he found financing, according to emails obtained by OCCRP.

Credit: ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy Stock Photo Paul Manafort, then-campaign manager for U.S. President Donald Trump, at the Republican National Convention in 2016.

After Manafort’s search for investors fell through, the deal went ahead without him. When Ukrtelecom, Ukraine’s public telephone operator, was finally privatized, one of the buyers appears to have been Dmytro Firtash, a gas and media mogul who is fighting extradition from Austria to the United States on corruption charges.

Manafort, who is now serving a prison sentence for tax and bank fraud offenses, was for a time chairman of U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. His conviction stemmed from the U.S. Department of Justice investigation led by Robert Mueller into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Manafort has a long history in U.S. politics and business, and a network of connections spanning the globe. His relationship to Ukraine stretches back to the early 2000s, and he was involved in efforts to elect Viktor Yanukovych as president in 2010.

During that campaign, Manafort worked closely with two local politicians: Yulia Lovochkina, a member of parliament, and her brother, Serhiy Lovochkin, who became Yanukovych’s chief of staff. Manafort and the Lovochkin siblings lost no time in planning deals to capitalize on Yanukovych’s victory, according to thousands of emails leaked to OCCRP that document a decade of correspondence between those three and others.

Seven months after Yanukovych won the election, Lovochkina wrote to Manafort about the planned Ukrtelecom privatization, suggesting that their influence on the bidding process could enable them to snap up the company at a favorable rate.

The leaked emails also reveal that Serhiy Lovochkin was the secret funder of a lobbying campaign Paul Manafort orchestrated in the European Union.

“Dear Paul! Please see below some thoughts on projects we discussed,” she wrote in a letter attached to a Sept. 13, 2010, email. The letter made it clear that her brother’s position as a top official in the Yanukovych government could prove useful.

“We can influence the conditions of the auction. So there is a space for maneuver,” wrote Lovochkina, who, in addition to sitting in the Ukrainian parliament, was also a delegate to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

She informed Manafort that she and her brother could work to “structure the conditions of the tender” in their favor, including barring any companies in which any state had a stake of over 25 percent.

Credit: OCCRP An excerpt from Yulia Lovochkina’s letter to Paul Manafort. Click to enlarge.

“We can provide a company that will qualify for the tender,” she wrote.

Lovochkina also noted that proposed legislation — a fund that would cover Ukrtelecom’s losses in servicing rural areas — could nearly double the company’s value, to around $4 billion.

“And you understand that [the] law can be adopted [either] before privatization [or] after. I hope you understand what this means,” she wrote, referring to the fact that the timing would affect the group’s plans.

The fund to cover Ukrtelecom’s losses was never implemented. But in the moment, Manafort responded to Lovochkina’s email with enthusiasm.

“I have forwarded the information to the appropriate people,’’ he wrote on Oct. 14. “I will have a conf call with them tomorrow. I will propose a meeting to be held next week. Goal of meeting is to have players at the table to discuss framework, proposal and next steps. Who would attend from your side?”

In reply to Manafort’s invitation, Lovochkina wrote that Grigori Dzekon, then the head of Ukrtelecom, would be among the attendees of his proposed meeting, suggesting that he was party to the insider privatization scheme. In an Oct. 5 email, Dzekon had advised Lovochkina against sharing too much information about the expected conditions of the tender with potential investors.

“They might suspect something straight-away,” he wrote.

Ultimately, Manafort was unable to secure financing for the purchase of Ukrtelecom, he wrote to Lovochkina on Nov. 16, despite “pressuring” a potential funding source in China. The scheme went ahead without him.

Manafort’s lawyers did not respond to requests for comment.

🔗Trasta Komercbanka The leaked emails also reveal that, through a proxy, Serhiy Lovochkin and Yulia Lovochkina were co-owners of a Latvian bank that hosted the Russian Laundromat, a vast financial scheme unmasked by OCCRP in 2014. Just under ten percent of the bank, Trasta Komercbanka, was held by U.K. citizen Charles Treherne. But according to the emails — in which the Lovochkin siblings are referred to as ‘Ginger’ and ‘Fred’ — Treherne in fact ran their family office. Under Lovochkina’s direct supervision, he handled their offshore firms, French villa, and art collection. A key part of Treherne’s work was to find ways of hiding the Lovochkins’ beneficial ownership of various assets. To this end, he and others acted as proxies for the power-broker siblings. “[Y]ou should never and nowhere use Principle`s name,” one of the consultants in the family office advised Treherne in an email, referring to his client. “All politicians must stand apart from business during three-five generations,” he continued. “Foreign businessmen with good reputation should be ultimate beneficial owners.” Ivan Fursin, a business partner and political ally of the Lovochkins, and a Ukrainian parliamentarian at the time, held another 33 percent of the bank. Together, the three co-owners appointed one member of its three-person supervisory council. The bank’s CEO, Igors Buimisters, a business partner of the Lovochkins, owned another 43 percent. A lawyer for the Lovochkins denied their ties to any wrongdoing, saying reporters’ questions had “no basis in fact.” Treherne did not respond to requests for comment. Besides being owners by proxy of the bank that hosted the Russian Laundromat accounts, the Lovochkins also used a system that showed up in OCCRP’s Laundromat data for their own payments, according to the leaked emails. For instance, in 2010, Treherne instructed Yulia Lovochkina’s secretary how to correctly draw up a fake contract to make secret payments via New Zealand shell firm Lynform Capital, an offshore suspected of being part of the Laundromat. “The Business activity [in the fake contract] should be consistent with the stated activities of the company, e.g. Metal trading, or ice cream manufacturer, gun running; whatever company Lynform has told the Bank,” Treherne explained. Show Hide

Dzekon remained CEO of Ukrtelecom after it was privatized, until 2011, and retained a supervisory board seat until 2013. He then relocated to California, where he co-founded an information technology company. He told OCCRP he could neither “deny or confirm the authenticity” of the emails and said he knew nothing about the Lovochkin siblings’ efforts to influence the Ukrtelecom privatization.

Lawyer Dan Shefet represents the Lovochkins, who today are both members of Ukraine’s parliament, where Serhiy is one of the leaders of the country’s largest opposition party. Shefet rejected any suggestion that Serhiy Lovochkin was involved in manipulating the telecom privatization, responding with a “clear, emphatic and unequivocal rejection of any and all of the ill-concealed accusations in question.”

In a message sent from her parliamentary e-mail address, which was CC’d to Shefet, Lovochkina told OCCRP that she had neither written nor ever seen the letter that had been sent from her account. She called the leak of the emails an attempt “to destabilize the political scene in Ukraine by defaming duly elected Members of Parliament and thereby inciting discord and distrust.”