The U.S. government now has the official authority to seize Paul Manafort's ill-gotten assets, including money and property, estimated to be worth about $15 million.
A court order last week authorized the U.S. Justice Department to immediately begin seizing money and properties Manafort agreed to forfeit after admitting he cheated the Internal Revenue Service, evaded foreign lobbying disclosure requirements and tried to tamper with witnesses in his criminal case.
“By agreement of the parties, the government will take custody and control” of Manafort’s Trump Tower condo in New York City and a home in the Hamptons — where he spent more than $2 million on a home entertainment system and a bed of red flowers in the shape of an “M”— starting “on or after” Saturday, the court ordered. Other assets to be forfeited include the contents of four bank and life insurance accounts and a condo in Manhattan’s Chinatown.
The six-page filing, by U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the District, follows Manafort’s Sept. 14 guilty plea in Washington to conspiring to defraud the United States and witness tampering over a decade of working for pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine. The order gives lenders 30 days to request changes to resolve debts or interests they may hold on the property the government will seize.
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Manafort’s attorneys gave courts varying estimates of his net worth over the course of his prosecution by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. They pegged it at $28 million as of the end of last year, during discussions to try to get bail. In closing arguments this August to federal jurors in the case in Alexandria, they argued he had a net worth of $21 million as of the end of 2016.
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Court filings did not spell out the dollar amount Manafort must give up.
Rather, they state that his lawyers and the government agreed that seven assets listed for forfeiture “represent property that constitutes or is derived from proceeds of, and property involved in, the criminal offenses.”
The value to the government will ultimately be decided when Manafort’s real estate is sold.
However, the total appears close to the $16 million that FBI forensic accounting experts at the Virginia trial testified he netted in unreported income.
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Manafort was allowed to retain his and his wife’s five-bedroom, $1.3 million home in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., and substitute his own Trump Tower condo in place of a Charles Schwab investment account co-owned with his wife. He also was allowed to substitute the Chinatown condo to preserve a debt-free house in Arlington he purchased for one of his daughters.
“It’s important to note that even criminals sometimes earn honest money,” [Patrick Cotter, a former federal prosecutor in Chicago] said. “The goal is not to turn guilty people penniless. The goal is to recover any money you can prove that he improperly got,” he said.
Government seizures cleared to begin in Manafort case in range of $15 million (WaPo)