In the Manafort and Rick Gates indictment, Special Counsel Robert Mueller argued that the two men used Lucicle to avoid paying taxes and to purchase lavish items in the United States. Among the purchases made by Manafort using money from Lucicle include three Range Rovers, a Mercedez-Benz, and a $14,000 piece of art. Manafort also sent $1.9 million from Lucicle to a real estate trust in Virginia to purchase his Arlington home.

A New York Times report from June, 2017 identified Lucicle, months before the Special Counsel’s indictment. In the report, the Times found that Manafort had been in debt to pro-Russia interests by as much as $17 million before he joined Trump’s presidential campaign. One of the companies that transferred money to Lucicle is owned by Ukrainian Party of Regions member of Parliament Ivan Fursin. A Daily Beast article in November of 2017 reported that Fursin was a senior member in the Semion Mogilevich criminal organization, citing a fellow at Johns Hopkins-SAIS’ Center for Transatlantic Relations

By far the largest expenditure to Manafort was the $7 million from Telmar in 2012 — something the Times did not mention. It appears that this money was then transferred to Manafort in the United States. Telmar is the only company that loaned Manafort money that was not mentioned by the Special Counsel’s office in the October indictment of Manafort and Gates. The omission is especially noteworthy because of the meticulous details in the indictment, listing every Manafort-involved Cypriot monetary transaction over a period of nearly a decade.

An analysis of Telmar Investments Limited (also spelled ‘Temar’ in the financial documents) reveals that no such company existed in the public domain at the time the loan was executed. According to OpenCorporates, the only companies sharing the same name were in Gibraltar and the United Kingdom. The Gibraltar company was struck off in 2005, and the United Kingdom company was registered at the end of 2017. Similarly named companies either were dissolved before 2012 or were registered well after. It remains unclear who loaned Manafort the $7 million.

In the months leading up to Manafort joining the Trump campaign, his life was in turmoil. He sobbed daily according to his daughter, following the collapse of President Yanukovych’s regime, the collapse of his marriage, and the collapse of his fortune. He owed millions of dollars to oligarchs in Russia and Ukraine — most notably the Kremlin-insider Oleg Deripaska. Desperate to settle his debts and rebuild his damaged image, he reached out to his friends in Washington and was soon on the Trump campaign.

Oleg Deripaska, left, and Paul Manafort, right

While leading the campaign, Manafort attended the now infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russian officials claiming to have dirt on Hillary Clinton. According to the transcript of the testimony of Glenn Simpson to House Intelligence investigators, Manafort made a cryptic note during the Trump Tower meeting saying, “value in Cyprus as inter.” Weeks after the meeting, he would be emailing an offer to Oleg Deripaska to give him private briefings about campaign issues. Given the context of the relationship between Deripaska and Manafort, it appears that this offer was a way for Manafort to get even with his Russian business partner.

The newly discovered loan to Manafort calls into question to whom he was indebted when he became Campaign Chair of Donald Trump’s campaign. Manafort and Gates are expected to be on trial in September.