How to Tell If You Are Running a Money Laundry:
1. Despite your multiple bankruptcies, shady foreign investors with ties to the Russian mob happily bankroll your projects.
2. Your investment portfolio consists largely of golf courses, a dying business so terrible Nike took a huge write-off to get out.
3. Your golf courses report huge losses year after year, but you keep buying more of them.
4. When asked about your customers, you brag to a real estate publication that "The Russian market is attracted to me."
5. Asked who bankrolls your projects without banks, your son in 2008 blurts out "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. . . . We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia." In 2014, your other son says “We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”
6. You buy a rundown estate in Florida for $50 million in 2004 and, without improvements, you sell it to a Russian oligarch for $95 million four years later, during the market crash.
7. You sell hideous, overpriced apartments -- to foreigners. In fact, from 2003 to 2017, people from the former USSR make 86 all-cash purchases of your properties, totaling $109 million — a red flag for ... money laundering.
8. You license your name to developers in money laundering capitals like Panama and they get caught ... money laundering.
9. The one bank that still does business with you paid a billion dollars in fines for ... money laundering.
10. Your Taj Atlantic City casino goes bankrupt in just a year. But in that short time you still managed to rack up 104 counts of failing to report large cash transactions and the largest federal fine to date for that form of ... money laundering.
A new report from the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence offers a damning portrait of the people Donald Trump chose as his partners for potential projects in Russia.
www.forbes.com
“A new report from the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence offers a damning portrait of the people Donald Trump chose as his partners for potential projects in Russia. They include individuals with alleged connections to the mob, to Vladimir Putin and to human trafficking.
The group would comprise an extraordinary list of associates for any international businessman, let alone for the sitting president of the United States.
Trump Organization representatives did not respond to requests for comment. In 2016, Trump Organization lawyer Alan Garten insisted that the business conducts thorough due diligence on its outside partners. “We do extensive vetting on everyone we do business with,” he told Forbes at the time. “We do background checks on an international level. We do background checks on a local level. We check every available database commonly used. We use outside experts who specialize in this area. And that’s in addition to looking at the deal itself. So extensive vetting goes on.”
Doesn’t seem like it. Here are the details on the people connecting Trump to Russia.
