In the last year, the nature of buyers for Trump properties has changed.
Since President Trump won the Republican nomination, the majority of his companies’ real estate sales are to secretive shell companies that obscure the buyers’ identities, a USA TODAY investigation has found.
Shell companies aren’t that unusual in real estate. What is unusual is the extent to which they’re being utilized to purchase Trump properties.
Over the last 12 months, about 70% of buyers of Trump properties were limited liability companies – corporate entities that allow people to purchase property without revealing all of the owners’ names. That compares with about 4% of buyers in the two years before.
What’s particularly interesting about this is: It’s not the first time. A decade ago, when Donald Trump’s seventh bankruptcy had wiped out his ability to borrow, he was dragged back from the brink of financial failure by money from Russian oligarchs. That infusion of money came not only in the form of big investments in new building projects, it also came through a money-laundering scheme that created LLCs for the express purpose of grabbing Trump properties at premium prices.
Among the dozens of companies the Almaty lawyers say the Khrapunov laundering network used were three called Soho 3310, Soho 3311 and Soho 3203. Each was a limited liability company, meaning their ownership could easily be concealed.
What was sold then is a fraction of what secretive LLCs are buying from Trump today.
Those companies didn’t go away. From 2008 on, they’ve been grabbing an inordinate amount of Trump properties.
The companies were created in April 2013 in New York. A week later, property records show, they paid a total of $3.1m to buy the apartments that corresponded with their names in the Trump Soho, a 46-storey luxury hotel-condominium completed in 2010 in a chic corner of Manhattan.
While attorneys general in multiple states may be suing Donald Trump for money he makes from hotels and other services, the big dollars in Trump’s coffers still come from turning over property. How much of Trump’s real income is being fronted by foreign governments? It’s very, very hard to say. And that money is all Trump’s.
Since Election Day, Trump’s businesses have sold 28 of those U.S. properties for $33 million. The sales include luxury condos and penthouses in Las Vegas and New York and oceanfront lots near Los Angeles. …
Profits from sales of those properties flow through a trust run by Trump’s sons. The president is the sole beneficiary of the trust and can withdraw cash any time.
These are dollars that are flowing into Trump’s pockets right now—unfiltered, unfettered, without restriction, and from unknown sources.
Their concern is that the secretive sales create an extraordinary and unprecedented potential for people, corporations or foreign interests to try to influence a President. Anyone who wanted to court favor with the President could snap up multiple properties or purposefully overpay, without revealing their identity publicly.
What’s piled up in Donald Trump’s account since the election isn’t just what he can skim from overpriced hotel rooms and hideously expensive cocktails. It’s $33 million in real estate sales to persons unknown. And that’s merely the start.
The value of his companies' inventory of available real estate remains above a quarter-billion dollars.