Are these under-the-table payments?

Ivanka Trump in Baku

PRESIDENT Donald Trump has made no secret of his dislike for laws that ban American companies from doing business deals with corrupt foreigners

I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA
    1. CNN Money —Donald Trump insisted Wednesday that his only dealing with Russia was when he sold a mansion (that he bought for $40 million) to a Russian billionaire for nearly $100 million.
      …
      The real buyer of the property was Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev.

 

  1. —At least three people have died and hundreds have been arrested in intense anti-government protests in Venezuela – as it emerged President Nicolas Maduro donated $500,000 (£389,800) from the debt-ridden nation to Donald Trump’s inauguration party.
    The South American nation’s opposition has vowed to keep up pressure on Mr. Maduro after three weeks of public unrest involving tens of thousands.
    The pressure on the president came as it emerged the Trump donation was paid by state-owned oil company PdVSA—which is heavily indebted to Russian oil giant Rosneft—through its US affiliate, Citgo Petroleum.
  2. —After Donald Trump became a candidate for President, in 2015, Mother Jones, the Associated Press, The Washington Post, and other publications ran articles that raised questions about his involvement in the Baku project. These reports cited a series of cables sent from the U.S. Embassy in Azerbaijan in 2009 and 2010, which were made public by WikiLeaks. In one of the cables, a U.S. diplomat described Ziya Mammadov as “notoriously corrupt even for Azerbaijan.”
    Trump Tower, Baku
    Trump Tower, Baku

    …
    According to [Alan] Garten [a lawyer for the Trump Organization], Trump played a passive role in the development of the property: he was “merely a licensor” who allowed his famous name to be used by a company headed by Ziya Mammadov’s son, Anar, a young entrepreneur. It’s not clear how much money Trump made from the licensing agreement, although in his limited public filings he has reported receiving $2.8 million. (The Trump Organization shared documents that showed an additional payment of two and a half million dollars, in 2012, but declined to disclose any other payments.) Trump also had signed a contract to manage the hotel once it opened, for an undisclosed fee tied to the hotel’s performance. The Washington Post published Garten’s description of the deal, and reported that Donald Trump had “invested virtually no money in the project while selling the rights to use his name and holding the contract to manage the property.”

  3. ABC News —There, indeed, was an FBI wiretap involving Russians at Trump Tower.
    But it was not placed at the behest of Barack Obama, and the target was not the Trump campaign of 2016. For two years ending in 2013, the FBI had a court-approved warrant to eavesdrop on a sophisticated Russian organized crime money laundering network that operated out of unit 63A in Trump Tower in New York.
    The FBI investigation led to a federal grand jury indictment of more than 30 people, including one of the world’s most notorious Russian mafia bosses, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov. Known as the “[Wow-Modal-Windows id=1]Little Taiwanese,” he was the only target to slip away, and he remains a fugitive from American justice.
    Seven months after the April 2013 indictment and after Interpol issued a red notice for Tokhtakhounov, he appeared near Donald Trump in the VIP section of the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Trump had sold the Russian rights for Miss Universe to a billionaire Russian shopping mall developer.
  4. San Diego Free Press —David Bogatin: In the 1990s, the FBI considered Bogatin one of the key members of a major Russian organized crime family run by a legendary boss named Semion Mogilevich. According to the late investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, Bogatin owned five separate condos in Trump Tower that Trump had reportedly personally sold to him.
    Vyacheslav Ivankov, another Mogilevich lieutenant in the United States during the 1990s, also resided for a time at Trump Tower and reportedly had in his personal phone book the private telephone and fax numbers for the Trump Organization’s office in that building.
  5. The Guardian —A lot of this Russian organized crime money flowed through Cyprus and one of its largest banks, the Bank of Cyprus. The bank’s Vice-Chairman, Wilbur Ross, is now U.S. secretary of commerce. When senators considering Ross’ nomination asked about Cyprus, Ross said Trump had forbidden him from answering questions on the subject.
    …
    Hearing for Wilbur Ross—
    JAMES HENRY: A second partner was the potash tsar of Russia, worth about $8 billion, a guy named Rybolovlev. And Dmitry Rybolovlev not only sold Donald Trump his house—bought Donald Trump’s house in 2008 for $95 million in Palm Beach, but he was also tagged as bird-dogging the president on the campaign trail, you know, intersecting with his landings in places like Charlotte, North Carolina, and Concord and Las Vegas, all over the campaign trail, and flying his Airbus 319 on these same routes. So, what was he up to? Why was Rybolovlev, you know, intersecting with the president’s campaign?
  6. Palm Beach Post —Two yachts believed to be the Anna, owned by Dmitry Rybolovlev, and the Sea Owl, owned by President Donald Trump’s financier Robert Mercer, are seen in a cove near the British Virgin Islands on .
  7. Financial Times
    Eric Trump    Eric Trump, promotes Russian business
    At the same time, the Trump family were gushing with praise for Russians. While marketing Trump SoHo, the tycoon’s second son, Eric, told Russian journalists that “the best property buyers are now Russian” while Trump himself said: “I really like Vladimir Putin.” —Trump’s first son, Donald Jr, told eTurboNews that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets…we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia”.

8 thoughts on “Are these under-the-table payments?”

  1. As reported by CNN

    $750,000 settlement reached with DC attorney general in case involving funds used in 2017 Trump inauguration

    In announcing the settlement, DC Attorney General Karl Racine said, “After he was elected, one of the first actions Donald Trump took was illegally using his own inauguration to enrich his family. We refused to let that corruption stand. With our lawsuit, we are now clawing back money that Trump’s own inaugural committee misused.”

  2. There is a $50m debt to Chicago Unit Acquisition Trust, secured against the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago

    This debt is mysterious. The trust is a corporation owned by DJT Holdings LLC—that is, Donald J Trump. Mr Trump appears to owe the money to himself. Asked about this unusual arrangement by The New York Times in 2016, Mr Trump said: “I have the mortgage. That is all there is. Very simple. I am the bank.” But he is the debtor, too, and it is not a typical mortgage; it is a “springing loan”, meaning it only comes due under specific conditions—typically a credit event such as a decline in credit rating. It has been suggested that this arrangement could be part of a tax avoidance strategy.

  3. Trump believes PUTIN helped him make $54M profit from the sale of his Palm Beach mansion in 2008, claims his disgraced ex-attorney Michael Cohen.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8728019/Michael-Cohen-said-Trump-believed-Putin-95M-sale-Palm-Beach-mansion-2008.html

    Since then the Palm Beach mansion has been demolished, divided into three lots and sold.

    Now, the question arises, who bought each of the three EMPTY lots for $30million+, when everybody knows the original plot, with the mansion on it, couldn’t sell for $41million?

    David Newman, a partner with Sills, Cummis & Gross in New York said he found the whole deal curious: “It was out of the ordinary because of the uniqueness of the property, the speed of the transaction,” and the fact that Newman’s team never was able to uncover any evidence that Rybolovlev had performed any professional reviews of the property.
    “If someone is paying $90-something million, more than anyone else has ever paid for a private residence, one would think they might look around and do a little due diligence, or even have an inspection,” Newman said.
    But Newman said his team never found any evidence Rybolovlev hired experts to weigh in on the property’s condition as a residence — or its value as a teardown — before he bought the place.

  4. More than a dozen Trump administration officials, current and former, described a clandestine relationship between Jared Kushner and the CEO of a Kremlin sovereign wealth fund.
    Dmitriev was one of the main participants in the infamous January 2017 Seychelles meeting with former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince (brother of Betsy DeVos, U.S. Secretary of Education), in which the two discussed a roadmap for U.S.-Russia cooperation in the new administration. In the years since, Kushner and Dmitriev have communicated—often at a distance, and at times through intermediaries—about ways the U.S. and Russia could work together. The conversations have touched on everything from creating a joint business council to increase investment, to working on a Middle East peace deal, to helping lead negotiations on a recent OPEC deal, to delivering those medical supplies, according to multiple senior officials.

  5. Part I

    Mr. Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank spans two decades. During a period when most Wall Street banks had stopped doing business with him after his repeated defaults, Deutsche Bank lent Mr. Trump and his companies a total of more than $2.5 billion. Projects financed through the private-banking division include Mr. Trump’s Doral golf resort near Miami and his transformation of Washington’s Old Post Office Building into a luxury hotel.

    Part II

    Danske Bank money-laundering scheme involving $230 billion unraveled

    Money laundering is the way clever crooks hide and eventually spend all of the money they have stolen. And this is a tale about what’s believed to be the biggest money-laundering scheme in history.

  6. Putin, as an agent of the KGB in former East Germany, knows exactly how to hide under-the-table payments. He will use corrupt officials (of foreign former USSR governments), foreign banks (Bank of Cypress, Danske Bank, Deutsche Bank, etc.), wealthy business owners indebted to him, and criminals wishing to ingratiate themselves.

  7. Lawyers for President Trump have released a letter asserting that the past 10 years of Trump’s federal tax returns “with a few exceptions” don’t show any income from Russian sources

    More …

    But an outside tax lawyer reviewed it and concluded it is “unhelpful” if the goal is to fully gauge any potential Russian entanglements the president may have.
    “Russians would not loan directly to Trump or his businesses. A Russian would, for example, fund a Cyprus corporation, which would lend to Trump or his businesses, possibly through other intermediary entities,” said Steven Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center.
    Likewise, a U.S. business would not invest directly in a Russian entity but would likely do so through a foreign corporation.
    “The letter only addresses direct lending and ownership arrangements, not indirect,” Rosenthal said.

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