Banks first flagged Paul Manafort’s activity as suspicious in 2012, the FinCEN files show

• Financial activity linked to Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former strategist, was first flagged as suspicious in 2012, leaked documents showed. 
• The documents are among those leaked to journalists from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). The FinCEN files show how $2 trillion worth of transactions that were flagged as suspicious were waved through the financial system.
• JP Morgan processed more than $50 million in payments for Manafort over a decade that were flagged as suspicious, according to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
• Manafort was convicted in 2018 on tax fraud, bank fraud, and failure to report foreign bank accounts.
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Banks first flagged the activity of Donald Trump’s former political strategist Paul Manafort as suspicious in 2012, according to leaked Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) documents.

The documents, known as the FinCEN files, revealed how big banks have for years engaged with dirty money. The files, leaked to hundreds of journalists, show how $2 trillion worth of transactions were flagged as potentially criminal to FinCEN, controlled by the Department of the Treasury.

Banks began filing “suspicious activity reports” on transactions linked to Manafort in 2012, and JP Morgan processed more than $50 million in payments for Manafort — who was convicted of fraud in 2018 — that were included in the leaked documents, according to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

The Guardian also reported that in 2017, JP Morgan filed a report on wire transfers worth more than $300m that involved shell companies in Cyprus that had dealt with Manafort.

The ICIJ said Manafort’s lawyer did not respond to an invitation to comment.

Manafort led Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign election for several months, but stepped down as political strategist in August 2016 after it emerged he had worked as a top consultant for the former Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, between 2014 and 2015. 

JP Morgan processed at least $6.9 million in transactions in the 14 months after his resignation from the Trump campaign, the FinCEN files showed.

In 2018, Manafort was convicted on five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud, and one count of failure to report foreign bank accounts, receiving a seven-and-a-half-year prison sentence. He was released early from federal prison in May over COVID-19 concerns, due to his frail health.

Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards, a senior advisor for the Treasury Department’s FinCEN, was charged in 2018 with leaking information about suspicious financial activity related to Manafort, as well as another of Trump’s former advisors, Rick Gates.