How will Manafort’s Nkandla play out in court?
There are discrepancies between what former Trump campaigner Paul Manafort paid for improvements to his Hamptons house, and what the work was worth
New York/Miami — There were the Oriental rugs worth $934,000, the four Range Rovers, the antiques — even $1.37m in clothes. The federal indictment of Paul Manafort, US President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, accuses him of laundering millions in foreign payments to pursue a "lavish lifestyle" in the US, especially in the Hamptons, where he has a house. What it doesn’t explain — or highlight — are the stratospheric payments he made to home improvement companies when his renovation work was estimated at far less. Special counsel Robert Mueller, in his indictment, says that a Hamptons firm got $5.4m in wire transfers from Cyprus over 71 payments. But building permits over the same period examined by Bloomberg show that renovations by Manafort’s Hamptons’ contractor were estimated to cost $1.2m. That’s less than a quarter of what was ultimately sent — an apparent discrepancy that could draw scrutiny from investigators. The indictment identifies the company as "Vendor A, Home ...
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