Looks as if the Manafort thing will be tomorrow's big story, unless Trump says something outrageous very early in the day. And it seems Corey Lewandowski is already gloating:
Putin's praise for Trump may mask 'conflicted' feelings, Kremlin watchers say The Russian president has shown warmth for the Republican nominee, and some fear a nefarious plot – but the ‘hysteria and paranoia’ may not be justified 16 August 2016 07.05 EDT [...] Whether or not Putin is rooting for a Trump presidency, some doubt that having the controversial tycoon in the White House would really be good for Russia. “That’s an incredibly simplistic view; it’s the view of propagandists, not analysts,” said Garbuzov. Analysts from his institute sit on various advisory boards to the foreign and defence ministries, but Garbuzov admits he does not know how much weight their more nuanced views on the US hold. “We can’t exclude that if Hillary wins, Russia and the US could end up having productive dialogue in a number of areas, and likewise if Trump wins, there could be total chaos. It’s clear that she’s anti-Russian, but she is an experienced politician who understands the world. He has no experience at all of politics; he’s a demagogue and a populist.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/16/vladmir-putin-donald-trump-ties-russia-us-election [with comments]
"Secret Ledger in Ukraine Lists Cash for Donald Trump’s Campaign Chief" .. ex now ..
[It's a long one with the excerpt below the only mention of Trump. Just yet another story of gross corruption within the banking industry.]
August 29, 2016 Issue
How a scheme to help Russians secretly funnel money offshore unravelled.
By Ed Caesar
The bank, beset by scandals and mismanagement, is in a precarious state.Illustration by Anna Parini
Almost every weekday between the fall of 2011 and early 2015, a Russian broker named Igor Volkov called the equities desk of Deutsche Bank’s Moscow headquarters. Volkov would speak to a sales trader—often, a young woman named Dina Maksutova—and ask her to place two trades simultaneously. In one, he would use Russian rubles to buy a blue-chip Russian stock, such as Lukoil, for a Russian company that he represented. Usually, the order was for about ten million dollars’ worth of the stock. In the second trade, Volkov—acting on behalf of a different company, which typically was registered in an offshore territory, such as the British Virgin Islands—would sell the same Russian stock, in the same quantity, in London, in exchange for dollars, pounds, or euros. Both the Russian company and the offshore company had the same owner. Deutsche Bank was helping the client to buy and sell to himself.
At first glance, the trades appeared banal, even pointless. Deutsche Bank earned a small commission for executing the buy and sell orders, but in financial terms the clients finished roughly where they began. To inspect the trades individually, however, was like standing too close to an Impressionist painting—you saw the brushstrokes and missed the lilies. These transactions had nothing to do with pursuing profit. They were a way to expatriate money. Because the Russian company and the offshore company both belonged to the same owner, these ordinary-seeming trades had an alchemical purpose: to turn rubles that were stuck in Russia into dollars stashed outside Russia. On the Moscow markets, this sleight of hand had a nickname: konvert, which means “envelope” and echoes the English verb “convert.” In the English-language media, the scheme has become known as “mirror trading.”
Mirror trades are not inherently illegal. The purpose of an equities desk at an investment bank is to help approved clients buy and sell stock, and there could be legitimate reasons for making a simultaneous trade. A client might want to benefit, say, from the difference between the local and the foreign price of a stock. Indeed, because the individual transactions involved in mirror trades did not directly contravene any regulations, some employees who worked at Deutsche Bank’s Russian headquarters at the time deny that such activity was improper. (Fourteen former and current employees of Deutsche Bank in Moscow spoke to me about the mirror trades, as did several people involved with the clients. Most of them asked not to be named, either because they had signed nondisclosure agreements or because they still work in banking.)
Viewed with detachment, however, repeated mirror trades suggest a sustained plot to shift and hide money of possibly dubious origin. Deutsche Bank’s actions are now under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, the New York State Department of Financial Services, and financial regulators in the U.K. and in Germany. In an internal report, Deutsche Bank has admitted that, until April, 2015, when three members of its Russian equities desk were suspended for their role in the mirror trades, about ten billion dollars was spirited out of Russia through the scheme. The lingering question is whose money was moved, and why.
[...]
John Cryan, the Deutsche Bank C.E.O., has little time to think about such embarrassments. Whatever the outcome of the various investigations into mirror trades, the bank is in trouble. It lost seven and a half billion dollars last year. Cryan has called the 2015 result “sobering.” Britain’s recent decision to leave the E.U. has imperilled Deutsche Bank even further. So far in 2016, the bank has lost half its market valuation, and in early August its stock price dipped to an all-time low, of $12.58. The only investors who now like the bank are short-sellers. The financier George Soros took a short position in Deutsche Bank before the Brexit referendum, effectively betting against the share price, and is estimated to have made more than a hundred million dollars as the stock nose-dived. Meanwhile, unlike many other Wall Street lenders, Deutsche Bank continues to loan millions of dollars to businesses associated with Donald Trump. When the Times questioned Trump recently about his credentials on Wall Street, he said that a private wealth manager at Deutsche Bank, Rosemary Vrablic, could vouch for him.
[...]
Since 2011, the Federal Reserve has performed a yearly “stress test” of U.S. lenders, assessing whether banks would have enough capital to withstand the shock of an economic downturn. Deutsche Bank failed the test in 2015, and failed again this June, when “broad and substantial weaknesses” were uncovered. Soon after the Federal Reserve’s latest report was released, the International Monetary Fund issued a dire warning. Deutsche Bank, it said, was not only “one of the most important net contributors to systemic risks in the global banking system”; it was also a contagious agent, because of heavy financial “spillover” between Deutsche Bank and other lenders and insurers. Any kind of failure at Deutsche Bank, the I.M.F. suggested, would be extremely bad news for everybody.
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