WASHINGTON: Corruption investigators in Ukraine say an illegal, off-the-books payment network earmarked $12.7 million in cash payments for US Republican Donald Trump’s presidential campaign chairman Paul Manafort, The New York Times reported on Monday.

It was not clear if Manafort actually received any of the money designated for him from 2007 to 2012 while working as a consultant for pro-Russia former president Viktor Yanukovych’s party, the newspaper said.

Manafort issued a statement vehemently denying any wrongdoing.

“The suggestion that I accepted cash payments is unfounded, non-sensical and silly,” it said, according to NBC News.

Manafort’s name appears 22 times in 400 pages of handwritten Cyrillic taken from ledgers found at the headquarters of Yanukovych’s Regions Party, The New York Times said. The article includes a scan of one of the pages. Those assigned payments totalled $12.7m.

The ledgers were obtained by Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau.

Investigators say the network was used to raid Ukrainian assets and influence elections while Yanukovych was in power.

Yanukovych was ousted in a 2014 pro-Western revolt, after which Russia seized the Crimean peninsula, fuelling a separatist uprising in the country’s east which has claimed some 9,500 lives.

The New York Times said investigators were also investigating a group of offshore companies that helped people close to him finance lavish lifestyles.

One was a cable TV deal involving a partnership assembled by Manafort and a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the newspaper reported.

Manafort is not a focus of this separate probe.

But The New York Times said it was clear that shady things were happening in Ukraine at the time and Manafort must have known this.

“He understood what was happening in Ukraine,” Vitaliy Kasko, a former senior official with the general prosecutor’s office in Kiev, said.

“It would have to be clear to any reasonable person that the Yanukovych clan, when it came to power, was engaged in corruption.”

In his statement, Manafort said: “Once again, The New York Times has chosen to purposefully ignore facts and professional journalism to fit their political agenda, choosing to attack my character and reputation rather than present an honest report.”

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign, meanwhile, deplored the “troubling connections between Trump’s team and pro-Kremlin elements in Ukraine”.

In a statement, it demanded that the Republican nominee disclose Manafort’s ties to Russian or pro-Kremlin entities, given Trump’s “pro-Putin policy stances” and “the recent Russian government hacking and disclosure of Democratic Party records”.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial that Trump should fix his stumbling White House campaign in the next three weeks or step down.

Trump had alienated his party and failed to establish a competent campaign operation, it said.

In an effort to right his campaign, Trump will deliver his second policy speech in as many weeks. Speaking in Youngstown, Ohio, he will outline his plan to defeat the militant Islamic State group.

Masood Haider adds from New York: Trump has blamed the “disgusting corrupt” media for biased coverage that has caused his poll numbers to sink.

“If the disgusting and corrupt media covered me honestly and did not put false meaning into the words I say, I would be beating Hillary by 20%,” he tweeted on Sunday.

A poll released on Saturday showed Clinton leading Trump by a comfortable margin in four key battleground states.

Trump shocked some of his own supporters last week when he suggested that gun rights advocates could take matters into their own hands if Democratic nominee Clinton became president and tried to appoint a Supreme Court justice who supported gun control.

The comment on the Second Amendment, that grants gun rights to citizens, was one of Trump’s many controversial remarks to plague his campaign.

Previously, he insulted Ghazala Khan, a Muslim American woman who lost her son in the Iraq War, and in a speech on Wednesday night in Florida, he said President Barack Obama and Clinton were the “co-founders” of the IS, a comment he later dismissed as “sarcasm”.

The Republican National Committee is reportedly considering cutting off support for Trump’s campaign.

Published in Dawn, August 16th, 2016