Donald Trump’s Tuesday press gaggle was most notable for its continuation of Trump’s casual racism and for how quick he was to toss a reporter from the White House for asking the wrong question. But down there at the very tail end of the whole session was one apparently disconnected bit …
Q: Just the Caucasian or white countries, sir? Or do you want people to come in from other parts of the world?
TRUMP: Out.
Q: Mr. President, is there any Kazakh money in Trump Soho?
TRUMP: No idea. Really no idea.
No idea? That’s odd. Because anyone who has ever looked at the Trump Soho has a very, very good idea.
Ever since a series of bankruptcies left banks unwilling to lend to him, Donald Trump has been on the lookout for partners willing to fund the buildings that bear his name. …
A Financial Times investigation has found evidence that one Trump venture has multiple ties to an alleged international money laundering network. Title deeds, bank records and correspondence show that a Kazakh family accused of laundering hundreds of millions of stolen dollars bought luxury apartments in a Manhattan tower part-owned by Mr Trump and embarked on major business ventures with one of the tycoon’s partners.
The question is not whether there was Kazakh money in Trump Soho. It’s whether there was any Trump money. But while it’s not certain that Donald Trump put any money in, he certainly got plenty out.
Because the Trump Soho was built as a money-laundering engine.
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Lawyers for Almaty told a US court in March that Mr Khrapunov and his family “conspired to systematically loot hundreds of millions of dollars of public assets . . . and to launder their ill-gotten gains through a complex web of bank accounts and shell companies . . . particularly in the United States”.
Those dozens of shell companies include multiple companies put together for the sole purpose of grabbing up chunks of Trump Soho at far higher than market values. Why do that?
“With any money laundering, you’re trying to make the illegally gotten money look legitimate,” Quick said. “So in the simplest terms, if you have real estate, you’re going to buy a piece of property with the illegal funds, hang on to it — or have rental income from it, so that rental income is legitimate — and eventually when you sell the real estate, you get your proceeds out of it and by all accounts it appears to be a legitimate transaction.”
But why would anyone pay extra? There are several possibilities. First, that extra fee could be just what’s required to get the original property owner to look the other way.
Money coming in from a foreign corporate entity, though, also can serve as a red flag to investigators. Another is someone who buys a property and then quickly sells it. Others are how the company is formed — Delaware corporations add a level of opacity, too — or who is listed as being involved in the business.
There’s another possibility as well, especially when someone pays $100 million for a home that’s valued at less than half that. That other possibility is a simple pass through, where funds move from LLC to LLC to LLC—and not all the cash ends up on one side of the line.
So was Donald Trump making money from foreign oligarchs by simply agreeing to ignore the source of the funds picking up his properties, or was some of his “profit” actually just a convenient pipeline where dirty rubles came in one end, and nicely laundered, folded, and pressed dollars went out the other?
That would be a good question for the next press pool, for anyone who doesn’t mind hearing “out.”
But don’t worry. Someone is already looking into the answer.