Trump Campaign Chief 'Worked for Montenegrin Independence'

American consultant Paul Manafort has said that he was hired by the Russian tycoon Oleg Deripaska, former owner of Montenegro's KAP aluminum plant and one of the largest investors in the country,  to support Montenegro's independence referendum in 2006 - but Deripaska declined to respond to BIRN's inquiry about the claim.

BIRN contacted Deripaska's EnPlus group in Moscow, his Russian headquarters, and the Brussels-based PR agency FTI Consulting, hired by the billionaire to run his Montenegrin business, after Manafort, who later became Donald Trump's election campaign chief, confirmed that he worked for Deripaska to help the country separate from Serbia in 2006.

"I have always publicly acknowledged that I worked for Mr. Deripaska and his company, Rusal [aluminium group] to advance its interests," Manafort said after the Associated Press reported on March 22 that he had signed a contract to work for Deripaska in 2006 for $10 million a year.

"For example, one of the projects involved supporting a referendum in Montenegro that allowed that country to choose membership in the EU, a measure that Russia opposed. I did not work for the Russian government," he insisted.

According to a memo quoted in the Associated Press report, Manafort pitched his services to Deripaska in 2005, after the Russian had already invested millions of dollars in the KAP aluminium plant in Podgorica.

Manafort managed Trump's campaign without pay between March 2016 and August 2016, when he resigned after investigators in Ukraine found handwritten ledgers showing $12.7 million in cash payments allocated for him.

The money reportedly came from the party of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted amid massive corruption...