the fbi wanted him arrested in alleged involvement in a multibillion dollar bribery scheme. authorities in vienna weren t willing to arrest him at the fbi s request. but they have not been willing to ship him over to the u.s. to face trial on these bribery charges. first thing they did is they let him out on bail. guess what he paid his bail, he paid $174 million as his bail. hey, if you got it, why not? literally wrote a check, $174 million. that $174 million bail payment has kept him out of jail for i think, like, five years now. but they also haven t sent him abroad to face trial. he has been fighting his extradition from austria with the help of some of the most expensive lawyers that money can buy. and, again, if you got the money to spend, why not spend it on that? in 2017 around the time the new york times is reporting on
dmitry take a cut of all of it. so, firtash was making billions of dollars a year for that. as a sort of hostess gift thank you for that arrangement, firtash in turn used some of his money to prop up pro-russia political parties in ukraine. pro-kremlin political parties in cr ukraine. pro-kremlin politicians including paying for paul manafort to run the party of regions and get victor yanukovych installed as ukraine s president. manafort reportedly owed millions of dollars to those two guys and the reason he owed them money is because of various business entanglements. he got involved with each of them. he had separate business deals with each of them. but there was one deal that they had in common. a supposed plan to spend almost a billion dollars turning a park avenue hotel site into a new bulgari tower in new york city. that one actually involved manafort and both of those kremlin-connected oligarchs.
aid, wherever you re talking about potential private interests trumping the public interests in terms of our international relations, it s easy to invoke national security. given your background, how do you specifically think this is dangerous to us as a country? well, in your earlier segment you spent a lot of time talking about background related to ukraine in position with the invasion of russia into crimea, and congress has appropriated funds, $250 million, specifically, to the security assistance of ukraine. and the fact that that money was withheld and to me, whether it was explicitly stated or not, i believe that the president and leadership within ukraine would understand in the case of these demands the fact that this money be withheld was meant to coerce their actions toward conducting this investigation. in this case, it s different because in this case the president and his lawyer rudy giuliani have stated, yes, we said this during the conversation, we asked them to
jackpot. now, that deal never came to fruition but it was the source of huge controversy in ukraine because it was seen as basically a bway, an effort, to launder hundreds of millions of dollars of ill-gotten gains through new york city real estate. but as with deripaska, it s not just the money and the kremlin connections and the unexplained financial ties to trump s campaign chair, with firtash, it s also the mob stuff. it s also the organized crime. in 2014 right after manafort s client, victor yanukovych was ousted in ukraine, ousted in a popular uprising and fled first to eastern ukraine and moscow for his own safety, three weeks after yanukovych was ousted from power and fled the country, russia s man in ukraine, dmitry firtash, this billionaire they created by giving him all that natural gas money, dmitry firtash was arrested at the fbi s request.
deripaska, right, one of the kremlin-linked oligarchs to man j anfort owed a lot of money. deripaska for years has been denied a visa to visit the united states reportedly of what the u.s. government believes to be deripaska s ties to international organized crime. deripaska was also sanctioned by the u.s. government in response to the russian attack on the 2016 election, although thanks to the intervention and largesse of republican senate majority leader mitch mcconnell, oleg deripaska was recently relieved of much of the burden of those sanctions. that s one of the two guys to whom manafort owed millions of dollars when he took over the trump campaign. the other guy was this fellow. guy with the three-piece suit there in the nice red tie. his name is dmitry fertash. paul manafort was running the political operations of the party of regions in ukraine, fertash was funding that party. he is rich, almost beyond believe, specifically because vladimir putin made him so.