PRESIDENT Donald Trump has made no secret of his dislike for laws that ban American companies from doing business deals with corrupt foreigners
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- 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.
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The real buyer of the property was Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev.
- 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.
- —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. - —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 …
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.” - 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 “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. - 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. - 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.
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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? - 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 .
- Financial Times
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”.
