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Rick Gates provided specifics about how he and an accountant for Manafort prepared fake documents to send to a bank to secure a loan.
In 2012, Manafort had collected money from Ukrainians in his shell company Peranova Holdings. To avoid paying taxes on that income, Manafort had told his accountants it was a $1.5 million loan, witnesses have said in court.
Four years later, when Manafort’s Ukrainian lobbying income had dried up, the political operative wanted new loans from banks. But the banks worried Manafort didn’t have the cash to support payments on that Peranova loan from years before.
That’s when Gates and accountant Cindy Laporta worked together to create fake documents — a cover letter from Laporta’s accounting firm and a back-dated loan forgiveness statement from Peranova to Manafort, signed by Manafort’s Cypriot law firm — to show the Peranova loan was forgiven, becoming income.
Prosecutors walked Gates through several emails Tuesday, saying as much.
Gates’ testimony corroborated what Laporta had explained to the jury last week, and he filled in the plan by recounting emails between him, Manafort and the accountant.
“Did he ultimately approve?” prosecutor Greg Andres asked Gates about Manafort’s knowledge of the plan. “He did,” Gates said in court Tuesday. The loan “never existed in the first place?” Andres also asked. Gates said that was correct, and that he told Laporta he would create the Peranova documents needed for the bank’s approval.
Andres asked Gates if the faked letter was effectively saying the loan forgiveness was “between Mr. Manafort and Mr. Manafort.” It was, Gates replied.
Laporta, Manafort’s personal and business accountant with the firm KWC, testified on Friday at length about how she knew the documents were faked and wrote the sham cover letter at Gates’ request for Manafort.
Gates also described in detail how he sent an out-of-date insurance policy to a bank to prove a Manafort-owned property had no mortgage on it, when current documents would have shown it did.
Citizens Bank had questioned whether it could loan Manafort money backed by a property that the bank thought was already encumbered.
“Mr. Manafort had asked me to submit the prior year’s policy,” Gates explained to the jury Tuesday. “The circles are now squared,” Gates wrote to Manafort in an email in 2016 about convincing the bank there was no mortgage on Manafort’s Union Street property.
Gates’ testimony about the bank fraud was somewhat dull in the last 30 minutes before lunch. A few spectators in the courtroom nodded off, yet several jurors took close notes. He returns to the stand after lunch.
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