True story. It starts at 515 N. County Road, Palm Beach. A property that languished on the market for 2 years, was sold at auction with 3 bidders. Jeffrey Epstein bid $36 million; Trump outbid him at $41 million in November 2004. The sale is reported in the Palm Beach Daily News.
“Judge Steven Friedman presided over the bidding by Trump and two other parties, Wall Street financier Jeffrey Epstein, a part-time Palm Beach resident, and developer Mark Timoth Prestige Homes, based in Boca Raton.
This has not been much reported. Lots of reporting and footage this week about a party video from 1992.
This is the property in Palm Beach that was resold, during the real estate recession of 2008 four years later, to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev, for more than double the original price, at $95 million. Purchased in 2008 with no engineering inspection, no appraisal. At a time when the market for Florida properties was tanking.
The initial 2004 purchase dovetails with phone message pad records of Epstein’s, published in 2016 by VICE News and obtained from investigators — showing 2 calls from Trump to Epstein apparently in November 2004. See these message pads as published by VICE News, below.
Michael Wolff in his book, Siege: Trump Under Fire (2019) (available Amazon), chronicled hard feelings between Epstein and Trump that boiled up over this real estate deal. Wolff claims Trump bought the property out from under Epstein.
The saga was made much more fraught when Trump resold to Rybolovlev, 4 years later for more than $90 million (after listing it for $125 M) .
Here’s an available page excerpt:
Siege: Trump Under Fire by Michael Wolff
Soon after negotiating the deal for the house in Palm Beach, Epstein took Trump to see it, looking for advice on construction issues involved with moving the swimming pool. But as he prepared to finalize his purchase for the house, Epstein discovered that Trump, who was severely cash-constrained at the time, had bid $41 million for the property and bought it out from under Epstein through an entity called Trump Properties LLC, entirely financed by Deutsche Bank....
.... A furious Epstein, certain that Trump was merely fronting for the real owners, threatened to expose the deal, which was getting extensive coverage in Florida papers. The fight became all the more bitter when, not long after the purchase, Trump put the house on the market for $125 million.
But if Epstein knew some of Trump's secrets, Trump knew some of Epstein's. …. Just as the enmity between the two friends increased over the house purchase, Epstein found himself under investigaton by the Palm Beach police. And as Epstein's legal problems escalated, the house, with only minor improvements, was acquired for $96 million by Dmitry Rybolovlev, an oligarch who was part of the close Putin circle of government-aligned industrialists in Russia, and who, in fact, never moved into the house.
So beyond video from 1992, there’s this financial contest between Trump and Epstein.
VICE published in 2016, phone message pads it claims to have obtained from investigators of the Jeffrey Epstein case. Find the originals (larger and clearer to read) at the VICE article.
To see the images in fuller size, refer to the first VICE screen capture, and the second VICE screen capture, with phone messages for “JE” or for “Mr. JE”. The first is for a page that starts 11/11/2004, and the second page runs from 11/16 to 11/20/2004. On each page of 4 messages, one of the four messages is from “Donald Trump”, phone number redacted by investigators.
Were Trump’s calls to Epstein in November to discuss the North County Road property? We don’t know.
The story doesn’t end there.
The buyer in 2008 who paid Trump $95 million also ended up launching a battery “gridbank” manufacturing firm, sited in Concord, North Carolina, in 2014 and 2015, named Alevo USA (with parent company, the Alevo Group, based in Switzerland).
Rybolovlev eventually gained more attention when his private Airbus plane was spotted on the same tarmac as the Trump campaign plane in North Carolina and Las Vegas on the day of campaign events. For the Trump property he purchased, he demolished the structure a few years later in a complete “teardown,” subdivided the 6 acres into 3 separate lots, and broke even on selling the 3 lots (after accounting for yearly carrying cost and property taxes of $1.4 M per year). The sales are somewhat opaque; it’s not clear who the ultimate buyer(s) are. For example, for one part of the sub-division, the “site was sold (in 2017) by County Road Property LLC, a company owned by Rybolovlev, for $37 million to 535 North County Road LLC, managed by Boca Raton attorney ….” Behind the purchasing LLC and the attorney, we don’t know the buyer.
Yet, Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif) thinks the fortuitous buyout worth an inquiry. She raised questions in December (though before Rybolovlev sold the last of 3 lots, just 2 weeks ago in July [to whom?] and apparently broke even on the transaction).
“Strange real estate deal raises specter of Putin buying Trump”
By Jackie Speier — Dec. 14, 2018
…. There is no question that Trump was in financial trouble yet again and needed money.
The recession had seriously depressed sales at the not-yet-complete Trump International Hotel & Tower Chicago. He was unable to make payments on a Deutsche Bank loan for $640 million. He had personally guaranteed $40 million of that debt.
And that was not all. Trump Entertainment Resorts, which owned the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City, was also failing….. Trump Entertainment was facing a $53 million payment to bondholders. The company was plummeting toward its third bankruptcy.
Trump had no apparent source of funds to meet these crises.
….
Rybolovlev’s purchase of the Florida mansion put about $74 million in Trump’s pocket. Trump suddenly had oxygen.
What had Trump done to earn such a favor? It may seem surprising, but the answer could be nothing. At least not then.
Trump was being enrolled in the Russian system of kompromat, of which Putin is a master. Grant a favor, ask for nothing. Both parties understand that someday something may be expected in return.
And Rybolovlev? Only four months after Rybolovlev bought Trump’s Florida mansion, the Russian government ruled that his mine had not caused the damage, blaming the collapse on long-dead Stalin-era planners. The stock price of Rybolovlev’s company soared. ….
It’s interesting to wonder, if Jeffrey Epstein hadn’t been overbid by Trump, would he have been able to woo the same oligarch purchaser from Russia?
Rybolovlev’s firm, ALEVO Energy, established a manufacturing site in Concord, NC for a lithium-ion Gridbank battery system to sell to utilities. It purchased the site in 2014, established facilities over the next several years for production of the battery systems.
See “A battery startup no one has heard of says it’s building a billion-dollar factory in North Carolina” (2014), by Katie Fehrenbacher.
Alevo Energy, funded by Dmitry Rybolovlev, contracted with a township in Maryland to install its “Snook” Gridbank battery — and connect to the PJM Interconnection network. (Yes, in several articles, the battery storage technology is said to be nicknamed “Snook.”
PJM Interconnection is a regional transmission network that coordinates electricity “through all or parts of Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia," according to its public facing website.
Alevo found it could not manufacture at scale profitably — and declared bankruptcy in August 2017. However, a new firm, Innolith purchased the R&D assets of Alevo, and delivered the battery Gridbank to Hagerstown, Maryland, with a hookup to PJM Interconnection.
The Gridbank was to be accompanied by GridMaestro software:
Jan 18, 2017 —
“To augment the installation of the GridBank, Alevo Analytics, the intelligence and analytics arm of Alevo Group, will provide its full suite of GridMaestro software and run other real-time analytics as well to verify the GridBank’s performance on the grid.”
See, “Why did Alevo fail?”, Feb 7, 2018, by Mark Plemmons.
Alevo’s product was a large battery storage unit called a Gridbank. It used a graphite and lithium-ion phosphate in its patented inorganic electrolyte. The Gridbank could store electricity until it was needed, which would be especially useful where wind and solar power were being captured. It was also thought to be a solution to places where the electrical supply was not stable.
According to Alevo, the Gridbank could be recharged almost endlessly and was not combustible. ….
Alevo’s product worked well and the company took plenty of orders for Gridbanks. The problem was they couldn’t build them on an assembly line.
After bankruptcy in 2017, Alevo’s R&D assets for the GridBank battery storage system were picked up by a new Swiss firm, Innolith.
OCTOBER 10, 2018 - - pv-magazine.com/2018/10/10/innolith-launches-inflammable-battery-with-50000-charging-cycles/
Innolith launches non-flammable battery
with 50,000 charging cycles
Innolith is taking over the baton from Alevo, including chief executive and engineers. Alevo, however, went bankrupt last year, making the same promises.
“…. With regards to the company’s major stakeholder Dmitry Rybolovlev, who is on the section 241 report list of foreign nationals to be sanctioned, issued by the U.S. Treasury Department, [Alan] Greenshields refused to provide information. ‘Innolith is allowed to do business everywhere in the world, and I cannot give information on our shareholder structure.’ “
Lithium Battery Hopeful Innolith Rises From Alevo’s Ashes
October 10, 2018
…. [Sergey] Buchin said the acquisitions were privately funded and Innolith is “well financed.”
He said the company was supported by a strategic investor, but did not disclose whether there is any connection between Innolith and Dmitry Rybolovlev, the Russian billionaire who originally bankrolled Alevo.
Innolith’s final acquisition was Alevo’s only operational GridBank battery system, nicknamed Snook, which has been hooked up to the PJM Interconnection electricity network for a year.
Is this fine?
Note, although this Russian industrialist was named on a published list of sanctioned individuals by the US Treasury, he was not among the very small subset of 7 Russian individuals to whom financial sanctions were actually applied.