Trump and Associates-II
2000-2014
The following comes from the below sources and various mainstream stories. Question Everything
Unlimitedhangout.com. whitney webb
Dark Towers -Deutsche Bank, Enrich
House of Trump, House of Putin, Unge
Trump Nation, O’Brien
Ordo ab Chao Volume Six: The Third Temple , Livingstone
Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America, Friedman
The focus here is not on Events during Trumps Presidency. That can be found here
There is some redundancy as this is quite long and there are so many connections it may help to repeat some of them
2000 Deutsche bank had plunked down another $150 million to be used for the renovations of Trump’s building at 40Wall Street.
The next year, Deutsche agreed to extend Trump a mortgage worth more than$900 million—at the time,the largest ever on a single property—so he could buy the General Motors Building on the southeastern corner of New York’s Central Park. (Trump already owned half of the fifty-story building; he wanted the rest.)
2000-Deripaska’s principle advisor is Nathaniel Rothschild, son of the current Baron of the family, Lord Jacob Rothschild. Nathaniel played a crucial role in 2000, when Deripaska and Roman Abramovich created a partnership and founded RUSAL, the largest aluminum company in the world.
In 2001, about a year after Putin signed a decree granting legal immunity to Yeltsin’s family, Deripaska married Yeltsin’s granddaughter, thereby cementing his own immunity and influence.
-Abramovich is the primary owner of the private investment company, Millhouse LLC and is best known outside Russia as the owner of Chelsea Football Club, a Premier League football club.
In their 2004 biography of Abramovich, the British journalists Chris Hutchins and Dominic Midgely describe the relationship between Putin and Abramovich as like that between a father and a favorite son.
Abramovich was the first person to originally recommend to Yeltsin that Putin be his successor. Abramovich and fellow oligarch Lev Leviev would go on to become Chabad Lubavitch’s biggest patrons worldwide.
2000-The case against Browder and the other investors was eventually settled in February for an undisclosed amount along with an agreement that Browder et al would sell their VSMPO shares.
Two years later Harvard Business school did a case study on Hermitage Capital and you want to know what Browder said to them about Avisma?
“The worst thing that has happened to me is when we resolved an asset-stripping dispute by seizing money offshore, which had been taken by the corrupt managment. Instead of admitting defeat the people who organized the asset stripping launched a racketerring lawsuit against me in the U.S. Imagine this, a bunch of Russian crooks accusing me of rackettering. Of course the case was dismissed.”
Of course the case was dismissed?
This guy is as fundamentally incapable of telling the truth as Hillary Clinton. Seriously. As of today, even Avisma’s attorneys have on the front page of their website a blurb about the case which reads, “The case was resolved with a favorable settlement for plaintiff.”
2000-Wilbur Ross went into private equity in , forming WL Ross & Co. He still runs it, but he sold it to investment firm Invesco in 2006 for some $375 million. In 2013 Invesco partnered with Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and others to buy 5 industrial properties from the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Brooklyn for $240 million.
Nearly all of Trump’s wealth is tied up in real estate, but he has also owned stocks. One holding, according to a May 2016 filing: $250,000-$500,000 worth of Invesco European Growth Fund Class Y shares. (Trump claims to have sold his stock holdings in June, though he has not provided evidence to support the claim.)
Trump and Ross are also neighbors in both Florida and New York. Not only is Ross’ 16,000-square-foot home just up the road from Trump’s 126-room Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, but the two also share a 57th-Street address in Manhattan. Ross’ penthouse is just two blocks from the president-elect’s Trump Tower triplex.
For those seeking influence in Washington, the president’s cabinet is the highest echelon. While concerns about potential conflicts of interest mount, one person who will have the Commander-in-Chief’s ear is his billionaire pal Ross. Will Trump and Ross’ latest deal be good for America’s balance sheets, or their own?
2000-Deutsche bank CEO Edson dies-in plane crash in December
2000-One of Kroll’s directors, Jerome Hauer, managed New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s Office of Emergency Management, which he had located on the 23rd floor of WTC 7 in 2000.
2001-Two years after Rolf Breuer’s lie about not being engaged in ubernahmegesprache with Bankers Trust, his deception threatened to come back to haunt the bank.
The Securities and Exchange Commission opened an investigation, and by March 2001, its enforcement division had reached a preliminary conclusion: Deutsche and Breuer himself should be punished for misleading investors.
The SEC’s head of enforcement at the time was Dick Walker, a permanently tanned,perfectly bald lawyer.A few months after his staff recommended taking action against Deutsche and Breuer, Walker made a surprising announcement: He was recusing himself from the case. Two weeks after that, the SEC—seemingly out of nowhere—informed the bank that ithad decided to close the investigation without any punishment.
And three months after that,in October 2001, Walker announced that he was taking a job as a general counsel at Deutsche. “Dick Walker probably knows more than anyone about U.S. securities laws and regulations,” a top Deutsche executive enthused.
Not long after, Walker hired Robert Khuzami, a federal prosecutor with a specialty in complex securities fraud cases,to join Deutsche and help shield it from government investigations.
Deutsche had discovered the power of the “revolving door”— the process of luring government watchdogs to the private sector—to neuter investigations.*
2001-Deutsche’s forty-floor Manhattan headquarters which had been the offices of BankersTrust—was right next to the World Trade Center. When the plane flew into the South Tower, some 1,500 windows were shattered in Deutsche’s building. When the towers fell,flying metal and concrete ripped a deep,fifteen story gash in the side of the building.
What used to be its entrance was now a smoldering heap of wreckage, with
shards of the World Trade Center’s grill-like facade embedded in the walls. Miraculously, only one Deutsche employee died.
Deutsche was planning to list its shares on a U.S. stock exchange for the first time. Much was riding on them being easily tradable in America, too.
In the privacy of his art-adorned fiftieth-floor condo in a skyscraper adjoining the Museum of Modern Art, Ackermann and his colleagues had secretly been plotting potential mergers with various U.S.banks, including JPMorgan, to transform Deutsche into a true global leviathan. To conserve cash, the proposed deals would take place mostly by swapping shares of Deutsche and its merger partner. That meant Deutsche’s stock needed to be publicly listed in the United States.
The New York Stock Exchange reopened a week after 9/11, and on October 3, Deutsche’s shares debuted, trading under the ticker symbol DB.I
Deutsche’s downtown building was ruined. Executives from Europe came to survey the wreckage and, wearing gas masks, encountered a horrific scene. Human body parts—the mangled remains of World Trade Center workers and first responders— littered the basement. The building was beyond repair.
But because it was filled with dangerous slevels of mercury,asbestos, toxic mold, and other nasty stuff, there was no way to dismantle it without spreading more poison in Lower Manhattan. So the shell of the doomed tower was draped in a veil of dark webbing, an enormous tombstone towering over the hallowed Ground Zero.
There it sat for years , ghostly,impenetrable reminder not only of 9/11 but also of the lethal mess that would soon lurk within one of the world’s biggest banks.
2001-The Enron Corporation was collapsing and this was formally announced in late 2001 amidst allegations of fraudulent accounting. They hired Kroll Zolfo Cooper to handle its chapter 11 proceedings. Many SEC and FBI records on Enron were likely lost in the WTC7 collapse
Greenberg's son, Jeffrey W. Greenberg, became CEO of Marsh & McLennan (MMC) in 1999 and chairman in 2000. The first plane of 9-11 flew directly into the secure computer room of Marsh (Kroll) USA, part of Greenberg's company.
In mid-October 2001, The Independent (UK) reported that, “To the embarrassment of investigators, it has….emerged that the firm used to buy many of the ‘put’ options (where a trader, in effect, bets on a share price fall) on United Airlines stock was headed until 1998 by Alvin ‘Buzzy’ Krongard, now executive director of the CIA.”
2001-According to the New York Times, Mayo Shattuck III “was made co-head of investment banking in January [2001], overseeing Deutsche Bank’s 400 brokers who cater to wealthy clients.” It is curious that Shattuck resigned immediately after the 9/11 attacks.
2001- Kroll controlled security at the World Trade Center complex through 2001 and was responsible for hiring John O'Neill, the former chief of counterterrorism for the FBI, an expert on Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda who was stopped from pursuing the USS Cole investigation, and who died on 9-11, reportedly his first day on the new job.
2001-allegations that Trump entered the Miss Teen USA changing room where girls as young as 15 were in various states of undress.
Mariah Billado, Miss Teen Vermont 1997 told BuzzFeed, “I remember putting on my dress really quick because I was like, ‘Oh my god, there’s a man in here.'” Three other teenage contestants from the same year confirmed the story.
The former pageant contestants discussed their memories of the incident after former Miss Arizona Tasha Dixon told Los Angeles’ CBS affiliate that Trump entered the Miss USA dressing room in 2001 when she was a contestant.
The same year former contestants say Trump unexpectedly entered the Miss Teen USA dressing room, the reigning Miss Universe, Brook Antoinette Mahealani Lee, recalls Trump asking her about the looks of his 16 yo daughter Ivanka, who was co-hosting the pageant. “‘Don’t you think my daughter’s hot? She’s hot, right?'” Mahealani Lee recalls Trump saying.
Trump denied all allegations
2002, Deutsche agreed to refinance about $70 million that Trump owed on some of his Atlantic City casinos. Those loans came out of Deutsche’s commercial real estate division,
which Kennedy was helping to run. Kennedy was the son of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy
2002-Epstein was associated with both Bill Richardson, former ambassador to the UN and former secretary of energy under Clinton, and Larry Summers, secretary of the treasury under Clinton. Both Richardson and Summers sit on the advisory board of controversial energy company Genie Energy, alongside CIA director under Clinton, James Woolsey; Roy Cohn associate and media mogul, Rupert Murdoch; Mega Group member Michael Steinhardt; and Lord Jacob Rothschild.
Genie Energy is controversial primarily for its exclusive rights to drill in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Bill Richardson appears to be among the Clinton era officials closest to Jeffrey Epstein, having personally visited Epstein’s New Mexico ranch and been the recipient of Epstein donations of $50,000 to his 2002 and 2006 gubernatorial campaigns.
Richardson gave Epstein’s donation in 2006 to charity after allegations against Epstein were made public. Richardson was also accused in recently released court documents of engaging in sex with Epstein’s underage victims, an allegation that he has denied.
2002-It starts with Bayrock . This is the company that Donald Trump teamed up with to build his Trump Soho project. There were three main actors . One was convicted mob associate and FBI informant Felix Sater. Another was Tevfik Arif, a likely Russian intelligence connection who was once was arrested by the Turks . The third was the late Tamir Sapir, another man with ties to Russian intelligence.
The late billionaire Tamir Sapir, was born in the Soviet state of Georgia .
Trump has called Sapir “a great friend.”
It was Sapir who introduced Trump to Tevfik Arif, the founder of Bayrock, aka Tofik Arifov.
In December 2007, he hosted the wedding of Sapir’s daughter, Zina, at Mar-a-Lago. The groom, Rotem Rosen, was the CEO of the American branch of Africa Israel, the Putin oligarch Leviev’s holding company, and known as Leviev’s right hand man.
As mentioned Leviev was one of two oligarch’s who Putin had establish the “Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia under the leadership of Chabad rabbi Berel Lazar, who would come to be known as ‘Putin’s rabbi.'” Sater, Sapier, Jared, Ivanka are all Chabad members and/or donors
Bayrock through its business practices brought into Donald Trump’s orbit a host of oligarchs and alleged mobsters involved in laundering money, the trafficking of underage women, feeding intelligence to the Russians, and more.
In court records from a lawsuit by former employees, it is alleged Bayrock was “covertly mob-owned and operated,” “backed by oligarchs and money [the oligarchs] stole from the Russian people,” and “engaged in the businesses of financial institution fraud, tax fraud, partnership fraud, human trafficking, child prostitution, statutory rape, and, on occasion, real estate.”
On paper, at least, Arif’s story was another stirring rags-to-riches saga. Tevfik Arif, born in Kazakhstan during the Soviet era, was a state-employed economist who turned to hotel development in Turkey in the 1990s before moving into New York property development where he founded Bayrock in 2001.
In 2002, after becoming a successful real estate developer in Brooklyn, he moved Bayrock’s offices to Trump Tower, where he and his staff of mostly Russian émigrés set up shop on the twenty-fourth floor.
When Arif and Sater helped put together several prospective Trump Tower licensing deals for sites including Moscow, Warsaw, Istanbul, and Kiev, Trump was ecstatic.
Thanks to Bayrock, he could bring franchising to high-end condos. He could be the Colonel Sanders of luxury high-rises. “It was almost like mass production of a car,” Trump crowed. For some projects, he boasted, he would get up to a 25 percent stake, plus management fees and a possible percentage of the gross—without having to invest a dime.
Trump worked closely with Bayrock on real estate ventures in Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. When it came to financing them, however, he was still so toxic after Atlantic City that he left matters of funding to his new partners.
“Bayrock knew the investors,” he later testified. Arif “brought the people up from Moscow to meet with [Trump].” Altogether, Bayrock’s leadership, as portrayed in its presentation materials, was a cozy family of billionaire oligarchs from the former Soviet Union.
In fact, the extent to which various Bayrock partners actually came through with financing is unclear, but according to Bayrock’s promotional literature, Arif turned to fellow Kazakh billionaire Alexander Mashkevich and his Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (or Eurasian Group, as it is called in Bayrock’s promotional literature), which he controls with Patokh Chodiev and Alijan Ibragimov, among others, to finance Bayrock. (Even though he was referred to on Bayrock’s website, Patokh Chodiev has denied any connection to Donald Trump, the Trump Organization, or Bayrock Group. Similarly, a person close to Mashkevich told Bloomberg that Mashkevich never invested in Bayrock.)
Together, the three men—known as “the Trio”—are major stockholders in the Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation and control chromium, alumina, and gas operations in Kazakhstan, which adds up to about 12 percent of the industrial production in the entire country.
Another Bayrock partner, the Sapir Organization, had, through its principal, oligarch Tamir Sapir, a long business relationship with Semyon Kislin, the Ukranian billionare commodities trader who was tied to the Chernoy brothers and, according to the FBI, to Vyacheslav Ivankov’s Russian mafias gang in Brighton Beach.
In June 2005, many of them came together when Arif celebrated his fifty-second birthday at the grand opening of the “seven-star” Rixos hotel in Belek on the Turkish Riviera near Antalya. Guests came from all over the world—St. Petersburg, the Côte d’Azur, Ukraine, Latvia, Israel, and Moscow, traveling by yacht and private jet.
This was no run-of-the mill gathering. There were huge mounds of caviar, food, drink, and song. Among the honored guests was then–prime minister of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who later became president. There were professional hockey stars, Moscow restaurateurs, and billionaires from all over the world. In all, Bayrock’s promotional literature boasted that it had seven billionaires affiliated with the company, in one way or another.
Among them was Tamir Sapir, who arrived on the Mystère, his 160-foot yacht, which has been described as the most beautiful private vessel in the world. Alexander Mashkevich cruised in on his yacht, the Lady Lara, which was nearly twice as big, at 299 feet.
Not all the Bayrock billionaires could make it, but one extremely high-profile tycoon in New York who couldn’t attend made sure that his presence was felt anyway. So on Tevfik Arif’s birthday, the familiar image of Donald Trump suddenly appeared on a big-screen videoconference call for the entire party to see.
By this time, Trump was indeed in the midst of a phoenix-like rebirth, both personally and professionally. His turbulent tabloid marriage to Marla Maples, his second wife, had come to an end, and he had married his third wife, Melania Knauss, a model from Slovenia, in January 2005, in a suitably extravagant wedding on his Mar-a-Lago estate that was attended by celebrities including Shaquille O’Neal and P. Diddy, then-senator Hillary Clinton, and former president Bill Clinton.
And when it came to real estate, Trump’s new paradigm was taking off like wildfire. He was all over Bayrock’s promotional literature, but he had nothing to do with financing and few development responsibilities.
The larger point was that Trump had created a new model where he was paid to put his name on major development projects. “He’s a marketing genius,” Adam Rose, president of Rose Associates, which manages more than fourteen thousand apartments, told the New York Times. “He’s gotten to the point where he can license his name.”
And license he did, lending his name to projects like Trump University, a “real estate training program” that turned out to be not a university at all but a gigantic high-pressure bait-and-switch scam* that “preyed upon the elderly and uneducated to separate them from their money,” as one affidavit from a former salesman for Trump University put it.
Felix Sater, the senior Bayrock executive who worked at Bayrock from 2002 to 2008 and negotiated several important deals with the Trump Organization and other investors. When Trump was asked who at Bayrock had brought him the Fort Lauderdale project in the 2013 deposition cited above, he replied: “It could have been Felix Sater, it could have been—I really don’t know who it might have been, but somebody from Bayrock.”
Although Sater left Bayrock in 2008, by 2010 he was reportedly back in Trump Tower as a “senior advisor” to the Trump Organization—at least on his business card—with his own office in the building.
Sater has also testified under oath that he had escorted Donald Trump, Jr. and Ivanka Trump around Moscow in 2006, had met frequently with Donald over several years, and had once flown with him to Colorado. And although this might easily have been staged, he is also reported to have visited Trump Tower in July 2016 and made a personal $5,400 contribution to Trump’s campaign.
Whatever Felix Sater has been up to recently, the key point is that by 2002, at the latest, Arif decided to hire him as Bayrock’s COO and managing director.
This was despite the fact that by then Felix had already compiled an astonishing track record as a professional criminal, with multiple felony pleas and convictions, extensive connections to organized crime, and—the ultimate prize—a virtual “get out of jail free card,” based on an informant relationship with the FBI and the CIA that is vaguely reminiscent of Whitey Bulger.
In any case, between 2002 and 2008, when Felix Sater finally left Bayrock LLC, and well beyond, his ability to avoid jail and conceal his criminal roots enabled him to enjoy a lucrative new career as Bayrock’s chief operating officer. In that position, he was in charge of negotiating aggressive property deals all over the planet, even while—according to lawsuits by former Bayrock investors—engaging in still more financial fraud. The only apparent difference was that he changed his name from “Sater” to “Satter.”
In the 2013 deposition cited earlier, Trump went on to say “I don’t see Felix as being a member of the Mafia.” Asked if he had any evidence for this claim, Trump conceded“I have none.”
2003, the Renova Group, along with Access Industries(owned by Leonard Blavatnik) and the Alfa Group(owned by Mikhail Fridman, German Khan, and Alexei Kuzmichov) announced the creation of a strategic partnership to jointly hold their oil assets in Russia and Ukraine, forming the AAR consortium. In the same year, they merged AAR with British Petroleum's Russian oil assets in a 50-50 joint venture named TNK-BP, the largest private transaction in Russian history.
Acting as a chairman of the executive board of TNK, Vekselberg was instrumental in negotiating and closing the transaction.
2003, another arm of Deutsche, focused on helping companies raise money by selling stocks and bonds to investors, agreed to work with Trump. The point man on this part ofthe relationship was Richard Byrne—another Merrill veteran who had been involved in the Taj Mahal debacle.(Byrne had helped sell the ill- fated Taj bonds to investors.)
Now Trump hired Byrne’s group at Deutsche to issue bonds for his troubled Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts. Byrne knew this would be an uphill battle; not only had Trump defaulted in the past,but he also had recently been taunting investors that he might stop paying back other outstanding bonds.
Waugh didn’t warn Byrne about the recently rejected $500 million loan, and Byrne organized a “road show” for Trump to meet with and try to win over big institutional investors.
He escorted Trump to meetings all over New York and Boston. At every stop, boardrooms and auditoriums were jammed with traders, fund managers, senior executives, and secretaries curious to see The Donald Show, and Trump didn’t disappoint. He rocked, he rolled,and he delivered wildly optimistic and inconsistent financial projections.
Afterward, Trump called Byrne to ask how much money they had raised. The answer, alas, was virtually zero. Byrne braced for an explosion as he explained to Trump that even though he’d been treated like a celebrity, nobody trusted him with their money.
Trump took the rejection in stride. “Let me talk to your salespeople,” he requested. Byrne agreed, and Trump came to deliver a pep talk. “Fellas, I know this isn’t the easiest thing you’ve had to sell,” he acknowledged. “But if you get this done you’ll all be my guests at Mar-a-Lago.”
Trump was always good at pushing an audience’s buttons—a weekend with Trump at Mar-a-Lago: bragging rights that not even money could buy— and this new incentive did the trick. The salesmen worked the phones, cast a wider net for more clients, and managed to sell an impressive $485 million of junk bonds (albeit at a high interest rate that reflected investors’ fears that Trump might default).
When the sale was complete,Byrne delivered the good news to Trump, who was pumped. “Don’t forget what you promised our guys,” Byrne nudged his happy client. “What’s that?” Trump asked. Byrne reminded him about the Mar-a-Lago trip. “No way they’ll remember that,” Trump weaseled.
“That’s all they’ve talked about the past week,” Byrne responded.
Trump ultimately dispatched his private Boeing727 to fly fifteen salesmen down to PalmBeach,Florida. Duringthe day, they golfed. Trump, decked out in white polyester, impressed the bankers with his brazen cheating. At night, they dined at Mar-a-Lago, and Trump regaled them with story after preposterous story about his hijinks with casinos, real estate, Wall Street, and women.
The following year, with his casinos on the rocks, Trump’s company stopped paying interest on the bonds and filed for bankruptcy protection. (“I don’t think it’s a failure; it’s a success,” Trump spun.)
Deutsche’s clients, the ones who had recently bought the junk bonds, suffered painful losses. Going forward, Trump would be off-limits for Byrne’s division.
2003-A year after Trump World Tower opened in 2002, Trump had agreed to let Miami father-and-son developers Gil and Michael Dezer use his name on the condominium towers, which attracted Russians moneny. “Russians love the Trump brand,” Dezer told Bloomberg.
Trump Tower in New York as well has received press attention for including among its many residents, tax-dodgers, bribers, arms dealers, convicted cocaine traffickers, and corrupt former FIFA officials. A typical example involves an illegal gambling operation that reportedly took up the entire 51st floor, run by the alleged Russian mobster Anatoly Golubchik, and Vadim Trincher, a dual citizen of the United States and Israel, as well as Trincher’s son Illya, and Hillel Nahmad, the son of a billionaire art dealer and heir of a descendant of a Jewish Lebanese art family, and another follower of Chabad-Lubavitch.
“This is the top of the top of the top in organized crime in Russia,” according to the prosecutor. The ring answered to Russian mob boss Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, whose organization the Interpol believes to be tied to Semion Mogilevich.
Tokhtakhounov, who holds both Russian and Israeli citizenship, is one of the world’s most notorious Russian mafia bosses, known as “Little Taiwanese.”
In 2008, Forbes named him the world’s third most wanted, after Osama bin Laden and el Chapo. He is accused of the bribing of judges in the 2002 Winter Olympics, in which a Canadian figure-skating team were denied their gold medal.
Seven months after he was busted in 2013, he appeared near Trump in the VIP section of the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Tokhtakhounov operated out of Trump Tower, just three floors down from Trump’s penthouse, what prosecutors called “an international gambling business that catered to oligarchs residing in the former Soviet Union and throughout the world.”
2004-Trump produced and starred in the reality series The Apprentice from 2004, which allowed him to depict himself as the ultimate businessman. Long before his run for president, Trump knew the power of TV: popping up on the small screen as a wildly successful tycoon who had earned his arrogance – and making these appearances repeatedly – made him more relevant to many Americans than any journalistic report about his actual triumphs and failures ever could.
His multiple bankruptcies and tarnished reputation among those who knew or dealt with him in real life didn’t matter. One rare negative depiction on TV was Sesame Street’s 2005 parody, Donald Grump, a character who bragged, “I’m the trashiest!”
JFK was the first TV-ready US president, but Trump is the first TV-star president
Trump dabbled in movies as well: there were cameos in Home Alone 2 and The Little Rascals, and the bullying Back to the Future character named Biff was based on him.
But TV made ‘The Donald’. Before social media, TV was the best way to truly connect with a mass audience. And his carefully crafted appearances show that he was more interested in – and better at – moulding public opinion of himself than perhaps anything else.
Trump told the Washington Post that he ignored the advice of his agent when he signed on to host The Apprentice in 2004. The show, which premiered when reality TV fever was at its height, was a genuine smash its first few seasons, with 20 million viewers watching in the first year. The Post says that Trump realised the series’ potential to reach a younger audience and that he insisted on inserting his name into the production as much as possible: for instance, in the copious shots of his private plane, "TRUMP" emblazoned across its side.
The Apprentice was such a ratings success that network NBC asked Trump to poke fun of his wealth by singing the Green Acres theme at the 2006 Emmy Awards (Credit: NBC Universal)
He also negotiated a 50% ownership stake in the show, and his first-season turn changed TV network NBC’s plan to rotate the host – other moguls like Richard Branson and Martha Stewart were slated to appear in future seasons – so that The Apprentice became a one-man show. (A later Stewart spinoff fizzled quickly.)
Trump’s catchphrase – "You’re fired!" – made him into the ultimate reality show truth-teller. He was Simon Cowell with a very American twist, a message that pointed criticism makes US businesses, and thus America as a whole, stronger, and that hard work is rewarded.
The Apprentice transformed him from a New York City tabloid figure into a TV star recognised in the heart of the Midwest – which would become key territory in his presidential campaign.
Apprentice producer Bill Pruitt expressed regret for having gilded the businessman’s image for the viewing public. He explained in an email to Vanity Fair that with the show, “some clever producers were putting forth a manufactured story about a billionaire whose empire was, in actuality, crumbling at the very same time he took the job, the salary, and ownership rights to do a reality show. The Apprentice was a scam put forth to the public in exchange for ratings. We were ‘entertaining,’ and the story about Donald Trump and his stature fell into some bizarre public record as ‘truth.’”
2004-The friendship between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein appeared, in public, to be quite sound, as far as Trump acquaintances go. (The loyalty-obsessed president has said that his only “real friends” are family members.)
Beginning in the late ’80s, Epstein and Trump hit it off, as shown in the recently unearthed footage of the two of them ogling NFL cheerleaders together at Mar-a-Lago in 1992. They were photographed together in 1992, 1997, and in 2000, with Trump’s then-girlfriend Melania Knauss.
According to Epstein’s brother, Trump also hitched a ride from Florida to New York on Epstein’s private plane sometime around the new millennium.
Then there’s that 2002 quote Trump gave to New York: “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
But according to a new report from the Washington Post, in 2004, the pair let a mansion called the House of Friendship tear them apart. Bidding on Maison de l’Amitie in Palm Beach, both Trump and Epstein really wanted to win the oceanfront property being sold out of bankruptcy.
The trustee in the case, Joseph Luzinski, told the Post of the process: “It was something like, Donald saying, ‘You don’t want to do a deal with him, he doesn’t have the money,’ while Epstein was saying: ‘Donald is all talk. He doesn’t have the money.’ They both really wanted it.” Around that time, Trump banned the financier from Mar-a-Lago without giving an explanation.
In November 2004, The Apprentice host said he was fixated on winning “the finest piece of land in Florida and probably the U.S.,” refering to the six-acre parcel that the bank seized from Abe Gosman, a businessman who made his money building nursing homes. It was, by Trump’s estimation, the “second greatest house in America,’” conveniently just a ten-minute drive from the number-one home, Mar-a-Lago.
Gosman had purchased the property in 1988 for around $12 million from Leslie Wexner, Epstein’s benefactor; with a strong initial bid at-auction of $37.25 million, it appeared the financier was about to take it back. But bidding soon shot up to $38.6 million and “Trump had made up his mind to get it no matter the price,” a lawyer present at the auction told the Washington Post. Trump’s bid eventually rose to $41.35 million, and he won the house.
That month also marked the last known contact between the two:
Two weeks after the auction, Palm Beach police followed up on a tip that young girls were seen frequently leaving Epstein’s house.
Four years after Trump won the bid, he sold it to Russian businessman Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95 million — a deal that was investigated by the special counsel as part of Robert Mueller’s inquiry into Trump-Russia connections
2004- in 1994, an American named Charlie Ryan had started a Moscow-based bank called United Financial Group. As Westerners clambered for a piece of the newly accessible Russian economy, United Financial grew quickly. Before long, it had one of the biggest stock-trading businesses in all of Russia.
Wanting to get in on this success story, in 2004 Deutsche struck a deal to buy 40 percent of United Financial, and two years later it acquired the remainder for $400 million. All of a sudden, Deutsche had become a leading player in the chaotic country, the top foreign bank for Russian IPOs and mergers, working for formerly state-owned enterprises that had fallen under the control of a new class of oligarchs.
2004, a newly arrived compliance executive started testing Deutsche’s anti-money-laundering systems and was stunned by what he found. Money was pouring into one of the bank’s main U.S. legal entities—Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas—from banks in Estonia,Lithuania,Cyprus,and most of all, Latvia.
Deutsche hadn’t batted an eye at the flood of transactions. All that business was lucrative for Deutsche, which pocketed fees on each transaction, but it spelled trouble with regulators. “You’ve got a big problem in Eastern Europe,” the new compliance executive warned his boss. “Dude, you have no idea,” came the unsettling reply.
Unlike Deutsche, the Federal Reserve had sophisticated software to track suspicious money flows,and it had been watching the Russian cash going to Latvia and then to the United States, where it soon disappeared into the luxury real estate market.
In 2005, a team of regulators walked from the New York Fed around the corner to Deutsches Wall Street offices, where they laced into executives for their Latvian lapses. The executives braced for a large penalty—something in the $100 million range seemed likely—and were pleasantly surprised when the Fed,along with
New York’s banking regulator, simply issued a written order requiring the bank to improve its anti-money-laundering systems. The caveat was that the next time similar problems cropped up, Deutsche wouldn’t get off so lightly.
2005, Steinmetz teamed up with another diamond magnate, Lev Leviev, to purchase the top ten floors of Israel’s Diamond Tower which also houses the Israeli Diamond Exchange. Haaretz.com reported that “the buyers intend to build a connector from the 10 floors – the top 10 floors of the building – to the diamond exchange itself in order to benefit from the security regime of the other offices within the exchange.” And benefit they did.
According to one website reporting on a Channel 10 (Israel) news story, from 2005 – 2011, an “underground” bank was set up to provide “loans to firms using money taken from other companies while pretending it was legally buying and selling diamonds.” The bank apparently washed over $100 million in illicit funds over the course of six years and both Steinmetz and Leviev were directly implicated as “customers” of the bank but I don’t believe either of them were charged in the case.
Then there’s HSBC’s involvement in the diamond industry and Leviev’s ties not only to arms dealer Arcadi Gaydamak via Africa-Israeli Investments but Roman Abramovich through the Federation of Jewish Communities in Russia (FEOR) but seriously, who’s got the time?
2004- Soros provided seed money for Mnuchin to start his own hedge fund, Dune Capital Management, “named for a spot near his house in the Hamptons,” according to Bloomberg Businessweek. Dune made investments in at least two Trump-related real-estate projects, and ended up settling a lawsuit with Trump over one of them.
At its peak, the firm had roughly $2 billion and was backed by the billionaire investor George Soros. It had a taste for real estate, movie financing deals and exotic investments including life insurance policies, which Dune bought through a third party at discounted prices from cash-poor older Americans.
Dune had plans to package the insurance policies — called life settlements — into bonds that could be sold to investors. Life settlements represent one of the most macabre actuarial bets that Wall Street has dreamed up. It’s a wager that the elderly person selling the policy will die sooner rather than later, meaning the hedge fund does not have to make many premium payments to keep the insurance policy in force and collect the payout upon that person’s death.
But the market for life settlements largely collapsed during the financial crisis.
Eventually, Dune, like many hedge funds during the worst of the crisis, faced investor withdrawals. Mr. Mnuchin and one of his co-founding partners, Chip Seelig, decided to wind down the operation. The real estate arm of Dune was spun off into a firm led by Dune’s third co-founder, Daniel M. Neidich.
2005-, Manafort began a secret deal with Deripaska whereby Manafort’s firm was paid $ 10 million per year to influence politics, business dealings, and media coverage inside the US, Europe, and the former Soviet republics in a way that would benefit Vladimir Putin’s government.
Deripaska was “among the 2–3 oligarchs Putin turns to on a regular basis,” according to a diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks, so Manafort clearly knew whose interests were being served. “We are now of the belief that this model can greatly benefit the Putin Government,” Manafort wrote in the proposal. He added that his firm would “be offering a great service that can re-focus, both internally and externally, the policies of the Putin government.”
2005-A Kremlin-backed think tank, the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation (IDC), was formed in New York in 2008 under Putin adviser Andranik Migranyan, which often partners with CFTNI. Migranyan was selected to run the IDC by Sergey Lavrov, according to a confidential State Department cable released by WikiLeaks.
Goodman suggests the IDC originated when Kremlin adviser Gleb Pavlovsky, Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and Paul Manafort to discuss forming a Russian-funded think tank, as reported in 2005 by the Russian-American newspaper Kommersant.
According to Forbes magazine, Deripaska is Russia’s sixth-wealthiest man, with an estimated fortune of $13.3 billion. In 2001, about a year after Putin signed a decree granting legal immunity to Yeltsin’s family, Deripaska married Yeltsin’s granddaughter, thereby cementing his own immunity and influence.
In 2010, the Financial Times published a story exploring Deripaska’s business relations with Sergei Popov and Anton Malevsky, alleged heads of Russian organized crime groups.
As early as 2005, Manafort secretly worked for Deripaska on a confidential strategy that he would influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe and former Soviet republics to “greatly benefit the Putin Government,”
.Manafort told Deripaska he was pushing policies as part of his work in Ukraine “at the highest levels of the U.S. government — the White House, Capitol Hill and the State Department.”
According to The Nation, Deripaska’s business partner, Nathaniel Rothschild, owns a stake in Diligence LLC, where Burt served as an Executive Chairman.
Diligence is a Washington-based, private global intelligence firm with William Webster, former director of the CIA and FBI on its advisory board.Diligence was co-founded by Nicholas Day, a former officer with M15. The chairman of Diligence’s chairman is Michael Howard, the former head of the British Conservative party.
In 2007, Diligence LLC was charged over allegations of corporate espionage in a case that involved the Alfa Group, for whom Burt functioned as an advisor, working closely with its co-founder, CFR member and the second wealthiest man in Russia, Mikhail Fridman.
Diligence offered Deripaska corporate intelligence gathering, visa lobbying, and help in obtaining a $150 million World Bank/European Bank for Reconstruction and Development loan that was useful in providing cover for Western investors concerned about RUSAl
2005-The thing that none of us knew on that November day in 2005 was that Bill Browder himself was about to run into trouble in Putin’s Russia.
Only days after his presentation in Monaco he was detained at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, had his visa revoked and was escorted onto the first flight back to London, barred indefinitely from entering Russia where he had lived and managed his firm.
In 2005, Browder was very bullish on Russia and said that every investor in the world should own shares of companies like Gazprom. After his exile he was very negative, explicitly warning investors to stay away from Russia
2005- Trump went back to Justin Kennedy’s commercial real estate group, seeking another enormous loan. This one was to build a ninety-two-story skyscraper in Chicago, which Trump planned to name the Trump International Hotel & Tower.
It was going to be one of the tallest buildings in America, a glittering riverfront high-rise that included a hotel, a spa, restaurants, and nearly 500 condominium units. Trump seduced the Deutsche bankers with flights on the same 727 that had recently brought Byrnes team to Florida.
He invited Kennedy to Trump Tower, six blocks away from Henry Villard’s garish Madison Avenue mansion. Trump lavished him and his colleagues with praise and explained that his daughter, Ivanka, would be in charge ofthe proposed Chicago development—that’s how important this project was to the Trump Organization, as his company was called.
Just as Waugh hadn’t warned Byrne about the rejected Trump loan,now Byrne didn’t warn Kennedy’s crew about the bank’s recent bad Trump experience. (“We just looked the other way,” explains an executive in Byrne’s division. “That was the Deutsche Bank culture.”)
Even so ,the Chicago loan had all the hallmarks of troubles.Not only had Trump defaulted over and over again, but before extending another loan, Deutsche conducted an informal audit of Trump’s finances.
He had declared to the bank that he was worth roughly $3 billion. But when Deutsche crunched the numbers that his accountants had compiled, they concluded that the real number was about$788 million.
In otherwords, Trump had been saying his net worth was almost four times larger than it really was. For most banks, this would have been the final straw; how could you trust a guy to repay a huge loan if he was lying about how much money he had?
Deutsche, though, was undeterred. Executives were so eager for growth and big deals, so convinced of their own intelligence, that they managed to look past the obvious red flags. (Plus, Trump hadn’t defaulted on the loans that the commercial real estate group had made dating back to the Mike Offit era.)
In February 2005, Deutsche agreed to lend him $640 million for the Chicago project. The actual recipients were limited liability companies that the Trump Organization had created specifically for this occasion to shield its owner if the project went bust. But Trump also agreed to provide an “unconditional payment guaranty”of$40million—that was what Trump personally would owe if his LLCs defaulted. (Trump also paid Deutsche a $12.5 million fee in connection with the loan.)
Deutsche soldoff pieces of the loan to other banks and investors, but it kept plenty of it on its own books, too. It was a fateful transaction, one that would shape Deutsche’s relationship with Trump for years into the future.
Around this time, and out of public view, Deutsche provided a series of other services to Trump. For starters,it created numerous“special purpose vehicles”to make it easier for him quietly to buy properties internationally.
Thanks to the magic of derivatives, the vehicles—with obscure names that hid their connection to Trump—enabled Trump to do real estate deals in places like Eastern Europe and South America without putting any of his own money on the line; not only was he taking out loans to finance the deals, but he was also using other people’s money to cover the small“equity”portion of the purchases.
For a fee, Deutsche and investors bore the risk, over many years, that the projects would fail. This sort of structure was not unheard-of for major real estate developers. “It’s a well-seasoned financing technique,”explains Mark Ritter,a Deutsche executive who worked on the transactions at the time. But it added to the bank’s already deep exposure to Trump—and helped the mogul strike under- the-radar deals in far-flung locales, including those that were popular destinations for people looking to hide assets.
2006-Deutsche also helped Trump find people to buy condos in his properties. When he partnered in 2006 with a Los Angeles developer to build a Trump-branded resort in Hawaii, Deutsche organized get-togethers in London and elsewhere to connect Trump and his partners with wealthy clients who used anonymous shell companies to buy blocks of units in the sprawling Waikiki hotel complex.
The bank played the same behind-the-scenes matchmaking role when Trump sought to drum up interest in a planned resort in Baja, Mexico. (That project collapsed.)
In both cases, Deutsche steered very rich Russians into the Trump ventures, according to people who were involved in the deals—just a couple of years after American regulators had punished the bank for whisking Russian money into the U.S. financial system via Latvia.
Some members of Jain’s inner circle had discussed the potential pitfalls of the Trump relationship,and they were worried.It wasn’t only the not-insignificant risk that Trump would default on loans. The bankers also knew how filthy the New York real estate industry could be. They talked about Trump’s well- documented ties to the organized crime world,and the possibility that Trump’s real estate projects were Laundromats for illicit funds from countries like Russia, where oligarchs were trying to get money out of the country.“
There was more to Trump’s relationship with Deutsche than money. The bank was still trying to establish its brand in the United States,and despite his financial woes,Trump—whose hit TV show The Apprentice had debuted in 2004 on NBC—provided splashy publicity for the bank.
2006- U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta violated the law in granting Epstein a sweetheart plea deal in 2006 without notifying Epstein's many underage victims.
They numbered scores and perhaps in the vicinity of one hundred, with two claiming at one time in a withdrawn lawsuit that they had been raped by both Epstein and Trump
The two, "Katie" and "Maria," have alleged that Epstein and Trump raped them at ages 12 and 13. But the lawsuits have been withdrawn, purportedly after death threats.
Acosta, now Trump's Labor Secretary in charge of federal efforts to fight sex trafficking nationwide, bagged the federal-state Epstein case when he was a Bush U.S. attorney in Miami, thereby benefiting the wealthy Epstein and his powerful friends, who have included Prince Andrew of the United Kingdom's royal family, Bill Clinton and Alan Dershowitz.
2006-Ackermann put a fellow Swiss German, Pierre de Week, in charge of reinvigorating the Deutsche bank business, and de Week hired small group of executives from Citi. One of them was Tom Bowers.
Bowers would handle Epsteins account which he had brought over from JP morgan after they stopped doing business with Epstein.
He surveyed the New York banking and social scene, asking anyone he could find who the best private banker out there was. A single name kept popping up: Rosemary Vrablic.
Rosemary Vrablic started in banking in the mid 80’s with Israeli Bank Leumi where the Kushners were customers.
Bowers met with Vrablic and was impressed. Her training over the years had left her with a keen grasp of how to structure loans to please clients while minimizing default risks.
In the summer of 2006, Deutsche persuaded the forty-six-year-old Vrablic to defect from Bank of America. Part of the deal was that she would report exclusively to Bowers and that she was guaranteed to be paid about $3million a year for multiple years,an unusual arrangement at the time.
To differentiate itself from a crowded field of competitors, Deutsche planned to do deals that were too risky or too complicated for rival banks to stomach—the same strategy that Mike Offit had deployed a decade earlier when trying to get the commercial real estate business off the ground.
“Deutsche needs damaged clients,” one of Vrablic’s former colleagues would explain. Financially healthy and uncontroversial billionaires could easily go to bigger,more prestigious American banks.Deutsche picked up the scraps,including clients with unusual needs.
When the billionaire Stan Kroenke wanted a loan to buy the iconic British soccer club Arsenal, some large American banks balked. Vrablic,however,hammered out a transaction in which. Deutsche would accept as collateral some of Kroenke’s other professional sports teams in the United States. The deal got done, and Deutsche reaped millions of dollars in advisory fees and interest on the loan—
“Rosemary saved the day again” became a common refrain inside the bank, which counted on her to rake in tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue. She was by far the top producer in the bank’s New York offices. Vrablic, by now bestowed with the uncreative nickname RV, kept mementos from her loans— including a golden shovel,to commemorate a construction project she financed—on display in her office.
Despite, or perhaps partly because of, her prowess, Vrablic wasn’t very popular inside Deutsche. Envious investment bank¬mers perceived her as a threat to their own relationships with cli¬ments. She had a tendency to be brusque, refusing to collaborate withprivate-banking colleagues;on an annual performance review, she was told she needed to improve her teamwork.
She stirred up even more resentment when Deutsche higher-ups trotted her out to regional offices to teach the bank s wealth managers how to boost their lending volumes. (“We felt disrespected,” one sniffed.)
Vrablic’s deal to report directly and exclusively to Bowers, the head of U.S. wealth management, meant that she bypassed the CEO of the private bank, to whom all of her colleagues reported. The arrangement added to her colleagues’ resentment of what looked like special treatment.
2006-Charlie Ryan became Deutsche’s CEO for Russia. “It’s obvious today that Russia is hot,” he explained to a reporter in 2006. “Three years ago”—when Ackermann had stomped on the bank’s gas pedal—“Deutsche Bank was the only one to see it.”
This did not strike everyone as smart. Some executives had reservations about doing business in Russia and, in particular, doing business with United Financial.
Ryan was an enigma; what was a boisterous American doing ensconced in the Moscow business scene? Executives, including one of the bank’s highest- ranking internal lawyers, wondered aloud whether he was an undercover CIA agent. Was this really the kind of person the bank should be tethering its reputation to?
A Harvard graduate, Ryan first came to Russia in the early 1990s as a banker for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) when he landed in St Petersburg to help advise the local authorities on how best to privatise local municipal assets.
One of his key initial contacts in the mayor’s office was one V. Putin, who was deputy mayor at the time to Anatoly Sobchak.
Spotting a gap in the market, Ryan and a partner Boris Fedorov decided to strike out by setting one of the country’s first ever investment banks.
“Charlie has had the intelligence to understand the Russian political and economic context before positioning, and to pick his partners well,” commented Eric Kraus, an independent fund manager in Moscow.
“He is totally without arrogance or strong ideological biases – he does not lecture the Russians on what they should be when they grow up, and as a result, he has been well received by the domestic investment community.”
Mr. Ryan co-founded United Financial Group (UFG) with Fedorov and became its Chairman and CEO in 1994.
Fedorov, Russia’s first modern finance minister under Boris Yeltsin, brought political clout and connections in the Kremlin while Ryan brought a hard-nosed ability to close a deal and rare understanding among foreign financiers on how to do `biznes’ in Russia.
In 1998, Mr. Ryan initiated the New Technology Group within UFG Asset Management, which sponsored an early-stage technology investment in ru-Net Holdings whose investments include Yandex.
In 2004 Ryan sold 40% of the investment bank UFG for $70m to Deutsche Bank. Deutsche bought the remaining 60% from the US banker and his colleagues in 2006 for the mouth-watering sum of $600m in 2006.
The two-step deal gave Deutsche the platform it coveted and within a year it established an unassailable lead in domestic equity and debt capital market league tables.
Ryan stayed on board as country chief of Deutsche Bank in Moscow as the German lender tried to handle the delicate succession issue. Key bankers defected to foreign and domestic rivals as lock-ins expired.
In 2008 Ryan took the helm at UFG Asset Management, a separate entity, and the same year he and Fedorov raised about $65m by selling a 40% stake in the company to Deutsche.
2006-Another concern was that Deutsche was pursuing business with Russian oligarchs, and that meant it was almost certainly getting its hands dirty with corrupt money. The only question was when, where, and how much—and whether the dirt would leave a permanent stain on the bank.
This, though, was what it took to achieve Ackermann’s return on-equity target—especially since Ackermann himself was an unabashed cheerleader of the bank’s expansion into Russia. Just as Georg von Siemens’s entrancement with the United States had led Deutsche into the Henry Villard swamp a century earlier, now Ackermann’s fixation with Russia would spur Deutsche into a similar quagmire.
Like Siemens in America, Ackermann was blinded by his fascination with Russian culture and had developed tastes for its theater, opera, and food (blini with caviar was among his favorite dishes). He visited the country as much as once a month,striking up what he described as friendships with some of the bankers in Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.
One of them, Andrey Kostin,was the chief executive of VTB Bank. VTB was a government-controlled lender that had financed Russian intelligence agencies and was suspected of conducting espionage via its archipelago of international outposts. (Two leaders of the FSB, the Kremlin’s modern-day spy agency, sent their sons to work at VTB.)
None of this seemed to deter Ackermann. He signed off on a $1 billion credit line that Deutsche extended the Russian bank. And at a cocktail party in Saint Petersburg, he suggested to Kostin that VTB should consider building its own investment bank to speed the development of Russia’s capital markets. Kostin heeded the advice.
2006-The Trumps began spending more and more time in Russia. Donald Jr., executive vice president of development and acquisitions for the Trump Organization, made about half a dozen trips to Russia over the course of a year and a half.
“[ I] n terms of high-end product influx into the US, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” he later told a Manhattan real estate conference. “. . . We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
And finally there was Donald Trump, emerging from a decade of litigation, multiple bankruptcies, and $ 4 billion in debt, to rise from the near-dead with the help of Bayrock and its alleged ties to Russian intelligence and the Russian Mafia. “They saved his bacon,” said Kenneth McCallion, a former federal prosecutor who filed suit against Mogilevich, Paul Manafort, Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, and others on behalf of former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko.
But Trump’s rescue by the Russians was not cost-free. By working with Bayrock, McCallion says, Trump may well have been performing gigantic favors for Vladimir Putin without even knowing it.
Indeed, in 2016, Trump’s political adversaries commissioned Christopher Steele, a former MI6 agent, to dig up opposition research on Trump, and among the most astonishing allegations in the infamous thirty-five-page Steele Dossier, which alleges Trump has been severely compromised by Russia, is that Trump unknowingly regularly supplied intelligence to Vladimir Putin.
On the face of it, Steele’s allegation seems absurd to anyone familiar with Trump’s insistent tweeting, impulsive outbursts, and scores of outrageous indiscretions. Who could possibly believe he had the discipline necessary to carry out such a daring intelligence operation?
On the other hand, Steele’s dossier specifically said the intelligence in question was about “the activities of business oligarchs and their families’ activities and assets in the US, with which PUTIN and the Kremlin seemed preoccupied.”
That kind of intel was crucial to Putin, because his relationship with the oligarchs often seesawed back and forth. (US intelligence would also be interested and Sater was a cooperator, why not Trump too? Double agent? )
Putin oversaw them with an iron fist, and when they fell out of favor, they either toed the line or ended up being purged jailed and/ or dying under mysterious circumstances
2006-In addition to being wired into the Kremlin, Sapir’s son-in-law, Rotem Rosen, was a supporter of Chabad along with Sater, Sapir, and others at Bayrock, and, as a result, was part of an extraordinarily powerful channel between Trump and Putin.
(Chabad as intermediate between Putin and Russian and US/Israel oligarchs?)
After all, the ascent of Chabad in Russia had been part of Putin’s plan to replace older Jewish institutions in Russia with corresponding organizations that were loyal to him.
When they began, Russia already had a chief rabbi, Adolf Shayevich, who was recognized as such by the Russian Jewish Congress. But when Abramovich and Leviev installed Chabad rabbi Lazar at the head of their rival organization, the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, the Kremlin recognized Lazar as Russia’s head rabbi and removed Shayevich from its religious affairs council.
Consequently, the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, the voice of Chabad in Russia, became so close to Putin that he even made a point of attending the dedication of their center in Moscow’s Marina Roscha neighborhood in 2001.
With Chabad’s Rabbi Berel Lazar leading the way, the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia was now providing Putin with a Jewish “umbrella” that allowed him to battle Vladimir Gusinsky, whose media properties had become critical of him and who even dared to back candidates opposed to Putin. “
But another reason for the close ties between Chabad and Putin was that both Lazar and Leviev had promised Putin that they would make their connections available to the Kremlin and “open doors to the corridors of power in Washington.”
At the time, Trump’s comeback in real estate and his ascent in TV were in full swing, but his political prospects were still dicey at best. However, his role in Bayrock and its real estate deals with Russian oligarchs were real and provided a connection to Moscow. That’s what made the Chabad channel so mysterious.
First and foremost, the biggest contributor to Chabad in the world was Leviev, the billionaire “King of Diamonds” who had a direct line to Rabbi Berel Lazar, aka “Putin’s rabbi,” to Donald Trump, and to Putin himself dating back to the Russian leader’s early days in St. Petersburg.
Leviev would later make major real estate transactions with Jared Kushner, including selling the retail space in the former New York Times Building to Kushner for $ 295 million.(Kushner borrowed most of the money from Deutsche Bank which was known to deal with Russian money launderers).
Levievs company (prevezon holdings) was involved in a government-prosecuted money laundering based on Browders say so . He avoided trial in 2017 with a financial settlement for a paltry 6 million — a year after Kushner and other members of Trump’s campaign team met with the company’s legal counsel in New York)
As an undergraduate at Harvard, Jared had been active at the campus Chabad House at Harvard. Jared later married Ivanka Trump and became a senior adviser to her father in the White House. Jared and Ivanka were also close to Chabad donor Roman Abramovich and his wife, Dasha Zhukova.
Another major contributor was Jared’s father, charles Kushner, an American real estate developer who was eventually jailed for illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering.
Indeed, one of the biggest contributors to Chabad of Port Washington, Long Island, was Bayrock founder Tevfik Arif, a Kazakh-born Turk with a Muslim name who was not Jewish, but nonetheless won entry into its Chai Circle as a top donor.
The Port Washington founder and head rabbi, Shalom Paltiel, happened to be an acolyte of Rabbi Berel Lazar, Paltiel’s “dear friend and mentor,” as he referred to Lazar. But he was also close to Felix Sater and later named Sater “man of the year” for Chabad of Port Washington.
In addition to Sater, Daniel Ridloff, a fellow Bayrock employee, was a member of the Port Washington Chabad house. Chabad supporters Rotem Rosen and his bride, Zina Sapir, of course, were tied to Bayrock through Zina’s father, Tamir Sapir, and they were such close personal friends of Trump that he let them have their 2007 wedding at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, with Lionel Richie and the Pussycat Dolls performing.
2006 On April 28, Josef Ackermann, chairman of the management board and the Group Executive Committee of Deutsche Bank, signed a “cooperation agreement” with Vladimir Dmitriev Chairman of Vneshekonombank (VEB) — a government-owned Russian development bank.
The stated objective of this agreement was to further intensify the cooperation between the two institutions on selected projects under the Public Private Partnership (PPP) and Private Finance Initiative (PFI) structures in the Russian Federation. This “cooperation agreement” becomes more pertinent when we consider Jared Kushner’s relationship with Deutsche.
2006-In the year he was murdered, Litvinenko was investigating suspicions that Roman Abramovich was involved in money-laundering and illegal land purchases.
The Jerusalem Post recently ranked Abramovich as the tenth wealthiest Jew in the world. Abramovich is the primary owner of the private investment company, Millhouse LLC and is best known outside Russia as the owner of Chelsea Football Club, a Premier League football club. In 1996, he acquired the oil company Sibneft, for about $US100 million, and sold it to Gazprom for $US13 billion a decade later.
His $5.6-billion legal dispute with a former business partner, Boris Berezovsky, nicknamed the “Godfather of the Kremlin,” uncovered evidence involving illicit activity including protection rackets, contract killings, arms dealings.
2007, Trump hosted the wedding of Sapir’s daughter, Zina, at Mar-a-Lago. The event featured performances by Lionel Ritchie and the Pussycat Dolls. The groom, Rotem Rosen, was Leviev’s “right-hand man” and the CEO of the American branch of Africa Israel, Leviev’s holding company.
Five months later, in early June of 2008, Zina and Rotem held a bris, a Jewish religious male circumcision ceremony, for their newborn son, which Leviev personally arranged to take place at Schneerson’s grave in Queens. Trump attended the bris.
A month earlier, in May of 2008, Trump and Leviev had met to discuss possible real estate projects in Moscow, according to a Russian news report.
Leviev had become the single largest funder of Chabad worldwide. Sapir, an active Chabad donor as well, joined Leviev in Berlin to tour Chabad institutions in the city in 2008.
2007-Exactly how much Trump knew about Sater and the inner workings of Bayrock was unclear—which is exactly the way he seemed to want it. But on December 19, 2007, Trump gave a deposition in a lawsuit he filed against author Timothy O’Brien. Two days earlier, New York Times reporter Charles Bagli had revealed that Felix Sater had a hidden past, and now that Trump was under oath it was possible to determine the extent of his knowledge. When asked about Sater’s criminal history, Trump testified, “[ I’m] looking into it because I wasn’t happy with the story. So I’m looking into it.”
In other words, under oath, Trump had admitted that he knew about Sater’s run-ins with the law. Because the deposition was marked “Confidential” and kept under seal, Trump may not have expected it to become public.
Regardless, Trump’s knowledge of Sater’s past was now a matter of court record. According to Jonathan Winer, the former money-laundering czar in the Clinton administration, if someone in Trump’s situation failed to investigate such allegations he would be “open to charges of ‘willful blindness’ in terms of the knowledge he had.”
“The responsible course of action would have been to have Sater resign and disclose Sater’s past to interested parties,” says Richard Lerner, who, with Frederick Oberlander, filed a qui tam lawsuit against Bayrock in 2015—that is, a civil suit that rewards private entities working to recover funds for the government. In this case, they charged Bayrock with laundering $ 250 million in profits from Trump SoHo and other projects, and setting up elaborate mechanisms to evade more than $ 100 million in state and federal taxes.
Sater’s attorney, Robert Wolf, characterized the allegations of “their extortionate litigations” as “baseless and highly defamatory.” But rather than extricate himself from the deal with Bayrock and a partnership with a convicted felon, Trump kept silent about Felix, continued working with Bayrock, and ultimately profited from the arrangement.
Indeed, according to Bayrock’s internal emails, rather than disclose the truth, Trump even saw the predicament as an occasion to renegotiate his fees—upward, of course. “Donald . . . saw an opportunity to try and get development fees for himself,” Sater emailed investors a few days after the deposition.
2007-On the 4th June 2007, while Browder travelled to Paris for a meeting with Hermitage Global’s directors, Artem Kuznetsov brought 25 plainclothes police to raid Browder’s offices in Moscow. At the same time, another police squadron raided the offices of the law firm Firestone Duncan with whom Browder had done a lot of business over the years.
Apparently, the police were after the files for “Kameya,” a Russian company owned by one of their clients through which Browder advised them on investing in Russia.
Browder’s lawyer in Moscow, the American Jamison Firestone. He came to Moscow in 1991 aged only 25. Landing in the chaos of the Russian transition, he founded a law firm together with another young American, and until Kuznetsov’s raids pretty much did well for himself.
Browder tells us that he liked Jamie Firestone and makes subtle contrast between this fit, handsome, “straight-talking,” honest American and the ghoulish Russians whom he describes as having “great skill in talking without saying anything.”
The official reason for the police raids: the tax crimes department of the Moscow Interior Ministry had opened a criminal case against Ivan Cherkasov, Hermitage’s Chief Operating Officer. They accused him of underpaying $44 million in taxes related to a Russian company named Kameya, which Hermitage Capital controlled and through which it transacted its investments.
Sergey Magnitsky’s assignment was to review all of Kameya’s tax returns. He quickly established that Browder’s COO Cherkasov had done nothing wrong, and should be in the clear legally
Department K proceeded methodically to raid Browder’s bankers in Moscow: Credit Suisse, HSBC, Citibank and ING, apparently looking for Hermitage assets.
Browder had by this time raised at least $625 million for his new hedge fund, Hermitage Global, and his prospects in London were again looking very promising. His family, his team, as well as his clients’ money were all safely out of Russia, and his lawyers assured him that it would be impossible for the Russian state to seize his personal assets.
Browder proceeds to deconstruct the scheme that the bad guys used in their criminal acquisition of money using the firms they stole from him. Hermitage earned $973 million in profits for 2006, through its three Russian subsidiaries: Rilend, Parfenion, and Makhaon. Their combined tax bill for the year was $230 million, and Browder claims they paid them in full.
But as the bad guys took control of Hermitage’s three subsidiaries, they arranged, with the help of phony courts and impostor prosecutors, judges and defence attorneys, to obtain legal judgments against the firms in the exact amount of their profits for 2006: $973 million.
The effect of these judgments was to retroactively zero out Hermitage’s firms’ profits. This way the bad guys could now apply for a full refund of taxes Browder’s firms previously paid. The refunds were soon approved and settled, and the tax authorities paid out $230 million to the bad guys into two obscure Moscow banks from where they quickly disappeared offshore.
As Browder will inform us later, this was “the single largest tax refund in Russian history.”
2007-Two hedge funds run by the investment bank Bear Stearns had just collapsed in July, 2007-early tremors in what would become a global financial earthquake.
One hot night, Deutsche banks Anshu and a few colleagues attended a dinner with a group of leading hedgefund managers and private equity executives. “The talk was all about how to avoid the oncoming train,” a Deutsche executive would recount.
Jain knew things were bad, but the apocalyptic tone rattled him. Around 9:30 P.M., he summoned his top lieutenants to a windowless hotel conference room and issued an order: “Put the ship into complete reverse.”
The bank needed to accelerate the sales of its riskiest positions, especially anything tied to the U.S. housing market, and they needed to do it now. It was a bold, prescient move, one that arguably saved the bank, and it would prove to be Jain’s finest hour.
The problem was that it was easier to order a fire sale than to actually ignite one. Much of the worst stuff sitting on Deutsche’s books wasn’t easily salable—not many people wanted to buy risky securities right then. And Deutsche’s computer systems were so disjointed that it was hard to even figure out what the bank owned.
Dark smoke billowed out of the abandoned Bankers Trust headquarters in downtown Manhattan.
It was a Saturday afternoon in August 2007, and the dark tower, cloaked in black mesh ever since 9/11, had caught fire after a construction worker dropped a lit cigarette. Hundreds of firefighters rushed to the scene, desperate to prevent the blaze from spreading and the poisons inside the structure from contaminating the surrounding area.
The conflagration soon engulfed thirteen floors of the building. It took seven hours to extinguish.Two firemen perished.
A bad omen signaling what was in store for the economy
2008- As the financial crisis reached full throttle in the fall , Donald Trump owed $334 million on Deutsche’s 2005 loan for his Chicago skyscraper.
The Trump loan had been diced into mortgage-backed bonds that Deutsche had sold to investors, while also keeping a portion for itself. The loan had been due in May 2008, but Deutsche, acting on behalf of itself and the bondholders, agreed to grant Trump a 6 -month extension.
With the November due date approaching, Trump sought another extension.This time the bank said no.
Trump,however,had no intention of repaying the loan on time. He asked his lawyers to figure out a work-around. One of them dissected each of the loan documents and,on a conference call with his colleagues to brainstorm how their client could wriggle out of his obligations, mentioned the existence of a so- called force majeure—act of God—provision in the loan agreement. That meant that in the event of an unanticipatable catastrophe, like a natural disaster, the contract wasn’t enforceable.
A lawyer on the call piped up that Alan Greenspan had just called the financial crisis a “credit tsunami”—and what was a tsunami if not a natural disaster, an act of God?
One lawyer, Steve Schlesinger,presented the idea to Trump.“It’s brilliant!” he declared, and Schlesinger and his colleagues basked in the warmth of Trump’s pleasure. He instructed his lawyers to execute the plan.
Three days before the loan was due, the lawyers wrote to Deutsche that Trump considered the financial crisis to represent a force majeure that allowed him to stop paying back his loan.
Days later, Trump filed a lawsuit citing the provision and accusing Deutsche of engaging in “predatory lending practices”— toward him!—and of helping ignite the financial crisis.
“Deutsche Bank is one of the banks primarily responsible for the economic dysfunction we are currently facing,” Trump asserted. In an extraordinary act of chutzpah, he sought damages of $3 billion.
Deutsche filed its own suit, seeking the $40 million Trump had personally guaranteed back in 2005. The bank pointed out that the same day Trump had notified Deutsche that the financial crisis constituted a contract-voiding act of godly devastation, he was quoted in two newspapers boasting about how he was unscathed by that very crisis.
One of his deputies was quoted bragging that Trump’s company had nearly $2 billion, ready to be deployed on a moment’s notice.
In trying to get Trump to pay back the money he owed, the bank made a persuasive argument for why it should never have loaned him that money in the first place. Deutsche’s lawsuit quoted from Trump’s book, Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life, in which the future president explained how he had handled banks during a real estate downturn in the 1990s. “I turned it back on the banks and let them accept some of the blame,”
Deutsche argued in the suit: “The fact that he is now resorting to the same tactics he has consistently employed throughout his career as a real estate magnate should surprise no one.” Indeed.
Shortly after the suit was filed, Trump bumped into Justin Kennedy. “Nothing personal,” Trump said. Kennedy replied that there were no hard feelings: Business was business. But when senior Deutsche executives learned about Trump’s litigation, they were irate.“
Kennedy, having made a killing off the financial crisis with CDO’s that cashed in on the crisis and now seeing an important client fall by the wayside, decided to leave the bank at the end of 2009.
Ultimately the parties settled in 2010 and Trump was given 2 years to pay up 40 million
2008, Kostin hired a team of more than a hundred bankers from Deutsche to work for VTB. The defections, while irritating Ackermann and Charlie Ryan, cemented Deutsches bonds to VTB—and to Putin’s clique.
Further gluing the two banks together was the fact that Deutsche in 2000 had hired Kostin’s son, Andrey Jr., in the bank’s London office, straight out of university. He would spend most of the next decade with Deutsche, eventually becoming a senior investment banker. Kostin Jr.’s prominent role, Ackermann would explain to a Russian newspaper years later, “is testimony to our good relationship”with the Russian financial establishment.
That good relationship extended to helping wealthy Russians launder money into the United States—a crucial service,since few American banks were willing to accept the legal risks associated with moving suspect funds into the country.
Oligarchs would move money to banks in neighboring Latvia. Those Latvian banks had “correspondent” relationships with Deutsche that allowed them to transfer money directly into American accounts set up in the names of innocuous-sounding shell companies.
2008-In the end, Sater remained managing director of Bayrock through 2008. Trump also continued to participate in the venture and enjoy its profits. “Inducing a bank to lend money based on a fraudulent loan application—i.e., concealing Sater’s criminal past—is bank fraud,” said Fred Oberlander.
“If you know that the loans were procured by fraud yet stay involved, it’s a conspiracy to violate money laundering and racketeering statutes.” “It’s certainly a question for [special counsel Robert] Mueller to look into,” said Jonathan Winer.
“What anyone in Trump’s position should have done is investigate those allegations [about Sater’s criminal past] to ensure that there was not a money-laundering operation.” But Trump wasn’t charged with any crime at the time.
Nevertheless, once condos in the building were finally put up for sale, the project suffered more than its share of problems. The building’s no-man’s-land neighborhood—not really SoHo—with its grand entrance beside Varick Street and the chaotic approach to the Holland Tunnel, made it a difficult sell.
In addition, in order to circumvent restrictive zoning laws, the project was explicitly marketed to prospective buyers overseas as a second or third home, with the highly challenging proviso that owners could live in their apartments only 120 days a year, and never for more than 29 consecutive days in any 36-day period.
In 2010, 15 Trump Soho condo buyers filed suit, charging the Trumps and Bayrock with “an ongoing pattern of fraudulent misrepresentations and deceptive sales practices.” According to the Daily Beast, among the claims made to spur sales were Ivanka Trump’s proclamations to Reuters and to the London Times in June 2008 that 60 percent of the 391 units in the building had been sold.
Documents later submitted to the New York attorney general showed that only 15 percent had found buyers. The suit was eventually settled, and the plaintiffs received 90 percent of their deposits back.
But in 2014, four years after its opening, more than two-thirds of the building’s condos remained unsold. The website Curbed headlined a story “Trump SoHo Heads to Foreclosure Due to Unsellable Condos.”
2008-Jody Kriss, a former Bayrock finance director, has claimed in lawsuits against his former employer, that the company was “covertly mob-owned and operated,” “backed by oligarchs and money they stole from the Russian people,” and “engaged in the businesses of financial-institution fraud, tax fraud, partnership fraud, human trafficking, child prostitution, statutory rape, and, on occasion, real estate.”
2008- in 2007 FL Group had invested 50 million USD in the Trump Tower and two other real-estate projects with links to Trump, Trump Soho in Manhattan and a development in Whitestone, Queens.
At the time the involvement of FL Group with the US real-estate mogul was the source of significant excitement in Iceland, as the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service RÚV reports in its review of the case.
The participation of FL Group in the Trump Tower came about due to a close relationship between the Icelandic investment company and Bayrock Group, the developer behind the Trump Tower. The two companies worked together on several projects at this time.
In February 2008, after the US real-estate bubble had burst, FL Group announced it was divesting itself of its real-estate projects in the US. The Trump Tower project, along with other US based real estate projects, were moved to a subsidiary of FL Group called FL Bayrock Holdco. This company posted more than 140 million USD in losses in 2008. The company was declared bankrupt in January 2014, costing investors and creditors nearly 130 million USD in losses.
2008-The Oberlander and Lerner lawsuit alleged Bayrock’s projected profits were “to be laundered, untaxed through a sham Delaware entity” to the FL Group, Iceland’s largest private investment fund, the first major firm to collapse in 2008 when Iceland’s financial bubble burst, and a favored financial instrument for loans to Russia-connected oligarchs who were, court papers claim, in favor with Vladimir Putin. 49 (The Kremlin has denied that Putin has any connection to the FL Group or Bayrock.)
According to Bloomberg, Eva Joly, who assisted Iceland’s special prosecutor in the investigation of the financial collapse, said, “There was a huge amount of money that came into these banks that wasn’t entirely explained by central bank lending. Only Mafia-like groups fill a gap like that.”
The collapse of Iceland’s big banks made headlines in Germany back in 2008. Private investors in Germany had substantial sums at stake in the small island nation. In particular, more than a few Germans had money in Kaupthing Bank, one of the big Icelandic financial institutions that went belly up.
The fact that German investors lost money in Iceland is well known. What’s less widely known is that Deutsche Bank also played a role in Kaupthing's bankruptcy.
In fact, Germany’s largest financial institution has faced several lawsuits arising from the Icelandic events, and has now reached a settlement with those affected, according to the bank's annual report.
Though the report doesn’t provide a figure, Deutsche Bank and the affected investors have apparently agreed to a €450-million ($486 million) settlement, according to Handelsblatt's information. A spokesperson for Deutsche Bank declined to comment on the case.
The dispute centers on a derivatives deal in which Deutsche Bank played a key role. As word spread in 2008 that all was not well at Kaupthing, the price of credit-default swaps for the bank rose, a clear sign of crisis on the horizon.
Unable to purchase insurance against its own bankruptcy, Kaupthing – in a desperate move – convinced several of its clients to buy credit-default swaps from Deutsche Bank. The catch was that Kaupthing in fact loaned its clients the money to buy the derivatives, in this way gaining influence over the price of its own debt.
Investors collect interest on these derivatives, but if the bank goes bankrupt, they can lose all or part of their investment. And when that happened to Kaupthing, investors held Deutsche responsible for their losses. They accused Deutsche of acting as a knowing accomplice to Kaupthing, a charge denied by the German bank, and demanded €509 million in damages.
Though Deutsche Bank settled in Iceland, it may not be entirely out of the woods when it comes to derivatives.
The U.S. Justice Department has closed its investigation. But the Fed and financial regulators in New York, which have wrapped up their own investigation, could move to impose a penalty, according to Bloomberg news agency in 2017
2008-Leviev met with Trump in Moscow to discuss potential deals for Trump in Russia. Then, in June , after Zina and Rotem’s son was born, Lev Leviev arranged for the bris, the Jewish ritual of circumcision, to take place at the grave of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the renowned Hasidic rabbi who was the spiritual leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement.
Touting the event as “the best bris invite ever,” New York magazine opined that the “invite list for this particular penis-chopping” was as chic as it gets, including hotelier André Balazs, restaurateur Giuseppe Cipriani, New York nightlife empress Amy Sacco, various real estate moguls, and, of course, Donald Trump and his future son-in-law Jared Kushner.
2008-Ladder Capital Finance launched with CEO Brian Harris, President Greta Guggenheim, and Chairman of the Board Alan Fishman. TowerBrook Capital Partners, GI Partners, and Meridian Capital Group were founding investors.
In 2009 Ladder Capital and Sovereign Bank spun off an underwriting group Beech Street Capital, which was sold in 2013 to Capital One.
2008-When Epstein pleaded guilty to two counts, including soliciting a minor for prostitution, in Palm Beach in June 2008 and registered as a Level 3 sex offender in New York, Wexner refused to discuss him.
In 2019, a Wexner spokesman told The Washington Post that the Wexners had severed all ties with Epstein in 2007. They condemned Epstein’s actions, the spokesman said.
It was only after Epstein died that Wexner described their relationship—and even then in opaque terms. In Wexner’s telling, he was another Epstein victim preyed upon by a devious mastermind. “Being taken advantage of by someone who was so sick, so cunning, so depraved is something that I’m embarrassed that I was even close to,” Wexner said during a speech in September 2019. In a letter to his charitable foundation around this time, Wexner claimed Epstein had “misappropriated vast sums of money from me and my family.”
Epstein had reportedly transferred back nearly $47 million to a Wexner-controlled charity fund in 2008.
But Wexner’s belated attempts to explain himself only raised more questions. Why, for instance, did Wexner not report Epstein’s alleged $47 million theft to the FBI?
2009, during the heat of the financial crisis, Mnuchin assembled a group of investors to make a bid for IndyMac, a California bank that had to be taken over by the federal government following one of the biggest bank failures in U.S. history. The group bought the bank’s assets for $1.6 billion and renamed it OneWest Bank, ultimately selling it in 2015 for $3.4 billion.
Because so many of the loans that the bank owned were distressed, it became a “foreclosure machine,” in the words of one housing advocate, a point that is likely to become a focus of criticism.
Munchkin would be appointed by Trump as Secretary of Treasury in 2017
Mnuchin also was involved with Hollywood, investing in such films as “Avatar,” one of the highest-grossing movies of all time.
Mnuchin, who invested in dozens of other films and is a credited producer on such blockbusters as Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice and Mad Max: Fury Road, was called out by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) in opening remarks for using “tax tricks” to hide profits from Avatar and other investments in offshore accounts.
Wyden (and later other Democrats) also faulted Mnuchin for failing to list his role as a director of the offshore account in initial disclosure forms to the Committee.
“I did not use a Cayman Island entity to avoid tax liability for myself,” said Mnuchin later in the hearing when asked whether he would support closing offshore tax loopholes and referring to his time running the Dune Capital Management hedge fund, which had a co-financing pact with 20th Century Fox. “The entity was set up to accommodate non-profit and pension funds. They followed the law.”
Mnuchin’s OneWest bank once invested substantial millions in Relativity Media, and for a time, he served as co-chairman of the Ryan Kavanaugh-led studio. Mnuchin resigned from Relativity weeks before the studio declared bankruptcy in July 2015.
After the resignation, but before the Chapter 11 filing, OneWest swept Relativity’s bank account for millions, something that was later blamed as one of the reasons precipitating the bankruptcy.
During Mr. Mnuchin’s tenure, OneWest faced allegations that it had foreclosed improperly on some borrowers. Fair-housing groups also filed a complaint with the federal government, claiming that OneWest was not meeting its legal obligation to make loans in minority neighborhoods.
Good pick Trump. Draining the Swamp or Filling it Up?
2009-Deutsche emerged as a winner following the crash. Its losses proved manageable. That was partly thanks to Anshu’s 2007 order to start selling risky stuff. It was also partly because the bank had found ways to paper over some of its toxic investments, hiding what would turn out to be several billion
dollars of losses from regulators and investors. And it was partly because some of the bank’s most adrenaline-crazed traders had placed gargantuan bets that profited from the implosion of the U.S. housing market.
The leader of this pack was a fast-talking bond trader named Greg Lippmann * By 2005, he’d concluded that the American real estate market was heading for a big fall, and he realized that the CDO business that Misra’s guys had been pumping up could be used as a vehicle to bet on it .
Misra signed off on using the bank’s own money for the wager—and then sweet-talked Jainin to increasing the normal risk limits so that Lippmann could supersize his bet. Teaming up with some big hedge funds, Lippmann created what one expert, Nicholas Dunbar, dubbed a “virtual CDO factory.”
But unlike a normal factory, this one churned out products that were designed to fail. Lippmann’s team and a cluster of elite hedge funds selected mortgage securities made up of the worst, most likely to default home loans—some sourced from MortgagelT—and then used a type of derivative called credit default swaps to gamble that the instruments would lose money. “I’m short your house!!!” was the slogan on the T-shirts that Lippmann’s squad giddily handed out to folks who were in on the bet.
Sure enough, when the housing market cratered, Deutsche earned many hundreds of millions of dollars in profits.For his part, Lippmann pocketed a $50 million bonus in 2007. Of course, there was some collateral damage.
For starters, many of Deutsche’s less sophisticated clients—the dupes who had bought the garbage the bank was selling—were losers, but the bank justified this on the grounds that it was simply providing those clients what they wanted, and what they wanted, very unwisely, was additional exposure to the peaking U.S. housing market.
Another not-inconsequential side effect of Lippmann’s big-bet—and a similar one orchestrated by traders at GoldmanSachs— was that it deepened the approaching financial crisis. Because these guys were stoking the CDO machine, the demand for mortgage-backed securities consisting of high-risk mortgages remained hearty, and that meant mortgage lenders—including Deutsche Banks MortgagelT— kept making those high-risk loans to people who couldn’t afford them.
Absent Lippmann and his ilk,fewer people (and institutions like Deutsche) would have made a killing, but fewer people with underwater mortgages would have lost their homes (and fewer banks probably would have collapsed).
Misra, with slicked-back hair and sad brown eyes, kept getting promoted, and he eventually became the bank’s head of credit trading (bonds, currencies, interest rates, and the like). There he would make his mark in part by pushing his team into the na¬scent field of collateralized debt obligations.
The essence of a CDO was that you smushed together a bunch of securities—often they were bonds made up of mortgages—and then carved that mass up into lots of slices, some riskier than others, which you would sell as new.
Under Misra’s leadership, Deutsche became one of the planet’s most prolific peddlers of these suddenly hot instruments.Investors—many of them unsophisticated European banks, pension plans,and municipalities—took Deutsche’s advice and bought truck loads of them.Before long,that one business was hauling in $1 billion a year in revenue.
Lippmann wasn’t the only one inside Deutsche cashing in on the crisis. Justin Kennedy was, too. Back in 2005, he had been trying to figure out how to explain the commercial mortgage business to some outsiders. On the whiteboard on his office wall, he sketched out a diagram of how mortgages get packaged into securities, which get packaged into other securities, which get packaged into CDOs, and on and on. It dawned on Kennedy that this whole structure was pretty flimsy. All it took was a wave of people or companies falling behind on their mortgage payments for the dominoes to start toppling.
Kennedy invited some colleagues to admire his whiteboard handiwork. “This will for sure collapse,” he predicted to them,and they started figuring out ways to profit from—or at least not lose money on—that collapse.
One of their strategies was to bet against banks that owned lots of CDOs. The fact that Deutsche had sold so many CDOs to banks helped Kennedy’s crew figure out which banks were most likely to suffer. By 2008, their bet had swelled into the billions of dollars.
It was a proud moment for Deutsche. “After some initial criticism, Deutsche Bank is recognized as one of only a few global financial institutions to master the crisis without direct government aid,” the bank crowed in a corporate biography on its website. This was at best misleading.
The Federal Reserve alone provided billions of dollars in loans to Deutsche, though a far cry from the ownership stakes that the federal government took in hundreds of American banks.
And Deutsche was indirectly aided by governments that bailed out its trading partners. Without such assistance, it likely would have suffered fatal losses.
But Ackermann basked in the glory—and an $18 million payday. He bought properties in Switzerland and New York, where he already had the fiftieth-floor condo in the Museum Tower. He won the 2008 European Banker of the Year award. The New York Times hailed him as “the most powerful banker in Europe.”
Ackermann harnessed that momentum and seized more power. He had been the speaker of the vorstand, but he wanted to be the actual CEO, a role that Deutsche had never previously had. A CEO wouldn’t serve at the whims of his fellow executives; he would be beholden only to the supervisory board. And the super¬ visory board, largely made up of employee representatives who generally lacked nuanced understandings of the business, would be much easier for Ackermann to steamroll. With the board’s acquiescence, he soon got his wish: Going forward, Deutsche would be led by a CEO.
2010, Arif and other members of Bayrock’s Eurasian Trio were arrested together in Turkey during a police raid on a suspected prostitution ring, according to the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot. At the time, Turkish investigators reportedly asserted that Arif might be the head of a criminal organization that was trafficking in Russian and Ukrainian escorts, allegedly including some as young as 13.
Arif denied all charges
2011 Charlie Ryan, who oversaw Deutsche Bank’s Russian operation from 2005 to 2010, is selling Deutsche the remaining 60% stake in UFG’s Capital Management unit that the German lender does not own.
His recently completed deal with Deutsche is the culmination of a long, and highly successful, build-up of UFG, without the extreme volatility and boom-bust cycle which has characterised other institutions working in this market,” added Eric Kraus.
UFG/Deutsche Bank has been a constant force in Russia over the past two decades when many domestic rivals have gone to the wall and even more foreign peers have come and gone.
His partner Fedorov’s untimely passing in late 2009 forced Ryan to stay on at the helm of UFG at a time when he was shifting his family and his focus homeward to Philadelphia.
Deutsche had a buyout option which was exercised this month to buy the remainder of the fund manager. UFG confirmed to EmergingMarkets.me that Ryan and Florian Fenner, who are the company’s managing partners, and the Fedorov family “hold significant stakes” in the firm, but declined to disclose how much they made from the deal.
“We confirm that other businesses of UFG Asset Management, namely UFG AM Family of Funds (five hedge funds and several international managed accounts), UFG Private Equity Funds and UFG Real Estate Funds, are not affected by the deal and will remain independent and in control of UFG Asset Management shareholders,” the Moscow-based UFG spokeswoman said.
Minus Deutsche UFG Capital Management, UFG Asset Management has about $1.25bn in assets.
UFG Wealth Management, which is operating as a stand-alone business, is also unaffected by the transaction with Deutsche Bank and will remain independent, the Moscow-based UFG spokeswoman said.
So Ryan, who has tempted the German bank with four nibbles of the UFG cherry, may yet tempt them with his remaining wares in wealth management, private equity and offshore funds.
That midas touch gleamed brightly when he decided to help fund creation of Yandex, a Russian search engine. Investors would have made a scandalous return if they banked a profit following its $1.3bn Nasdaq debut in May 2011.
The stock soared 55% in the first day of trading although it is not known when, or if, Ryan and the other angel investors sold out.
Ryan has parlayed that interest in tech into setting up Almaz Capital Partners, which invests in Russian technology and innovation.
Meanwhile over at Deutsche Bank, the German investment bank has fallen on hard times since Ryan wound down his involvement.
VTB Capital plundered over 100 staff in three years, and insiders said the move was engineered by Yuri Soloviev after he was overlooked as Ryan’s replacement.
But Ryan’s legacy, as he is wont to remind people, is a diaspora of talented bankers who have gone on from Deutsche Bank and UFG to help build and sustain Russia’s capital markets.
Mr. Ryan became a non-executive director of Yandex at the time of its initial public offering in 2011.
In 2006, Deutsche Bank acquired 100% of UFG's investment banking business, and Mr. Ryan was appointed chief country officer and CEO of Deutsche Bank Group in Russia and remained in that position until the end of 2008, when he became chairman of UFG Asset Management. From 2008 through the end of 2010
2010, Vekselberg was appointed President of the Skolkovo Foundation, a non-profit organization funded by a mix of private investors and the Russian government, with the goal of building a technology research hub in Russia.
As its President, Vekselberg signed a deal for Cisco Systems to invest $1 billion over ten years into Skolkovo Foundation projects.
The Federal Bureau of Investigations subsequently issued a statement claiming that the Skolkovo Foundation was being used by the Russian government to gain access to classified American technology.
2011-The litigation between Trump and Deutsche over his refusal to repay the loan on his Chicago skyscraper had dragged on for two years. It was finally settled in 2010 with the bank agreeing to give Trump two years to make good on his obligations, including the $40 million that he had personally guaranteed.
That meant that Trump needed, by 2012, to come up with a bunch ofmoney. And if he wanted to keep expanding his empire, he would need to identify a new source of credit. The trouble, as ever, was that serious banks wouldn’t get anywhere near him; the risks, financially and reputationally, were far too great.
Even Deutsche, it Seemed, was now off-limits after the Chicago debacle, especially since it was the second time that a division of the bank had effectively banished him as a client.
Jared Kushner had married Ivanka Trump in 2009,and he was becoming familiar with the Trump family’s finances. He knew his father-in-law was looking for cash.
He regarded Vrablic as the single best banker he’d ever worked with; she had become a good friend of the Kushner clan.(WhenJared threw a party in 2007 to celebrate his purchase of The New York Observer, Vrablic was there at the Four Seasons restaurant,mingling with guests like Tom Wolfe.)
So Jared in 2011 invited Vrablic over to Trump Tower to meet his wife and father-in-law.Trump explained his situation to the banker, and then he popped the big question: Would Deutsche’s private bank be willing to lend him$40 or
$50 million with Chicago’s Trump International Hotel & Tower as collateral? That would allow him to repay what he still personally owed Deutsche for the Chicago loan.
Vrablic was excited by the prospect of landing a major deal with a major new client. She brought the proposal to Tom Bowers, who agreed that it was worth considering.
A small team sifted through Trump’s personal and corporate financial records and tax returns. The first thing the bankers noticed was that Trump was assigning absurdly rich values to his real estate assets. In one especially egregious case, he claimed that an estate he’d purchased in NewYork’s Westchester
Couunty for about $7 million was now worth $291 million.
His stratospheric valuations “were extremely aggressive,” recalls a person who reviewed the documents. “He used the most optimistic assumptions at all times.” The bank ended up reducing the assets’ values by as much as 70 percent.
The funny thing was that, not withstanding Trump’s serial exaggerations, his underlying finances weren’t all that bad. He had limited debt,at least compared to his fellow real estate magnates, and cash was pouring in from The Apprentice and from licensing deals he’d struck to put his name on properties he didn’t own.
Making the deal more palatable for Deutsche, Trump was willing to personally guarantee the loan,meaning that Deutsche in theory could seize his assets if he didn’t pay it back. (The fact that a similar, albeit smaller, personal guarantee hadn’t prevented him from defaulting on the original Chicago loan did not seem to bother the bank.) Aside from the minor detail that he was a recidivist defaulter, Trump looked like an attractive borrower.
When top executives in Anshu’s investment-banking unit heard that another division was about to rekindle the Trump relationship,they went ballistic.
If Trump defaulted yet again, which seemed entirely possible, how would Deutsche explain that to investors and regulators?
Bowers and Vrablic argued that from the private bank’s standpoint, the loan was sound. What’s more, Deutsche and Trump had settled their litigation back in 2010.
Bowers wasn’t afraid of a fight. He’d earned a reputation for playing hardball with colleagues. Now he asked his boss, Pierre de Week, for help pushing the loan through, and de Week appealed to Joe Ackermann.
Ackermann, in his final months as CEO, had embarked on a worldwide farewell tour and wasn’t fully engaged. Having cruised through the financial crisis, he told de Week that he didn’t object to the Trump loan.
The bank’s lawyers reviewed the situation. In December 2011, one of them, Steven Haber, emailed Bowers to report that “this client is cleared.” (Haber previously had clerked for Judge Maryanne Trump Barry,Donald’s older sister.)
Stuart Clarke, Deutsche’s chief operating officer in the Americas, emailed Bowers a similar message, reflecting the sign-off . Attached to the email was a huge PDF file containing all of Trump’s personal and corporate financials, to make clear that everyone who’d vetted the proposed transaction was fully aware of the new client’s heavy baggage.
2011- Leon Black was a widely respected figure on Wall Street, and an important connection for Epstein. The two met in the late 1990s, and Epstein soon began working for Black. Over the next 15 or so years, including after Epstein’s guilty plea in 2008, the two men met at Epstein’s townhouse in Manhattan.
Black also put Epstein on the board of his family foundation, according to public charitable filings. Those documents show that Epstein stayed on the board of the Debra and Leon Black Foundation until 2012, well after he pleaded guilty in Florida. Black has described that as a paperwork error; he said Epstein stepped down in 2007, the year before his plea.
Epstein’s financial advisory firm took a roughly 6 percent equity stake in Environmental Solutions Worldwide in 2011. Two of Black’s sons serve on the board of the company, which makes emission control products, according to the company website. Bloomberg, reported that he had given Epstein access to Apollo’s senior executives.
It would later come out Apollo Global Management CEO Leon Black paid child sex predator Jeffrey Epstein $158 million for financial advice from 2012 through 2017, despite knowing Epstein pleaded guilty to sexually abusing an underage girl in 2008, a probe by a law firm retained by Apollo found.
2011-A new Kremlin-backed infrastructure financing entity — the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) — opens in 2011. Russians sign up several high-powered international advisors, including Schwarzman, and another Kushner lender, Leon Black of Apollo Global Management.
Putin hand-picks Kirill Dmitriev — a former Goldman Sachs banker — to run the RDIF, initially set up as a part of the VEB, a bank that will later figure in the investigation of Russian help to Trump’s campaign.
2012-, Trump announced plans to buy the Doral Resort & Spa in Miami. The resort was wending its way through bankruptcy, and Trump got the price down to $150 million, with the understanding that he would probably have to spend that amount again to upgrade the golf courses and the hotel. Trumphad no intention of personally paying for the project.
One of his first phone calls was to Rich Byrne, who years earlier had helped Trump’s casino company sell junk bonds and had been rewarded with the weekend trip to Mar-a-Lago. Trump’s subsequent default on those bonds had ended his relationship with Deutsche’s securities unit, which Byrne now ran, but the two men had stayed in touch.
Now, in early 2012, Trump told Byrne he was preparing to buy the Doral and asked whether Deutsche would consider providing financing. Byrne agreed to take a look at the numbers, not bothering to tell Trump that there was zero chance Deutsche would actually help him.
Byrne, though, didn’t know that the private-banking division was in the mix. Trump invited Vrablic to Florida to see the property. The day after she got back to New York, she walked into Bowers’s office. “Trump wants to go buy Doral,” she explained, and he wanted Deutsche to loan him the money for the purchase.
For the second time in a matter of weeks, Bowers dispatched a team to study a possible Trump loan. The conclusion was that Trump seemed to be getting the resort at a reasonable price.And Trump not only agreed to personally guarantee the loan,but he also vowed to add millions of dollars to his wealth-management account at Deutsche.
The bank charged fees for managing those assets, and so the relationship with Trump would become a bit more lucrative.
The caveat, Trump and his daughter Ivanka warned Vrablic, was that if Deutsche couldn’t get the loan approved quickly, they’d have to shop it to a rival bank. The private bank was ready to pull the trigger, but once again the investment bankers in New York got wind of what was happening. Once again, Anshu’s Army angrily protested.
The Doral loan went up through the chain of command, the investment bank’s concerns were overruled, and the transaction got approved. A legal entity in the United States—Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas, or DBTCA—wired two loans totaling $125 million to the Trump Organization.
Afterward, Trump called Byrne’s office.“Rich,”Trump bellowed,“I’m just calling to thank you! I know you must’ve approved it, but Rosemary and her team gave me the money.”
Byrne, thinking on his feet and happy to take credit, pretended that he knew all about it. He congratulated Trump and then, as an aside, asked about the interest rate that Vrablic’s squad was charging on the loan. Trump said it was well under 3 percent. Byrne couldn’t believe it.
2012-Ladder Capital started doing business with Trump in 2012 when it provided a $73 million GAP mortgage and $100 million loan on Trump Tower.
2012-Trump received a loan from Deutsche Bank’s wealth management unit to pay off the $40 million debt and that loan was facilitated by Rosemary Vrablic. Trump moved his business from the commercial real estate lending division to the private wealth division where he did deals to finance Trump National Doral Miami and the Trump Old Post Office in Washington D.C.
In addition to Trump and Related Companies’ Stephen Ross, Rosemary Vrablic has also worked with Jared Kushner. A month prior to the 2016 election, Kushner received $285 million from Deutsche Bank, to refinance a loan used to purchase part of the former New York Times building from Africa Israel Investments (AFI), a company owned by Lev Leviev, which has been involved in the Prevezon money laundering case.
Kushner also has a connection with Ladder through founding investor Meridian Capital, which counts Kushner Companies as one of its largest customers. In 2012 Meridian arranged a $371 million loan, provided by Ladder Capital spin off Beech Street Capital, to Kushner Companies to fund their stake in several Maryland apartment buildings.
The various overlapping connections among these companies and developers is likely representative of common intersections in the finance and real-estate world. However, given the significant leverage Ladder Capital and Deutsche Bank have as holders of hundreds of millions of dollars of Trump debt, it’s important to bring these business connections and potential conflicts of interest to light.
2012 article in the Jerusalem Post titled “At Putin’s side, an army of Jewish billionaires” mentioned three Russian-Jewish billionaire oligarchs in particular who are close to Putin: Mikhail Fridman, Moshe Kantor and Lev Leviev.
Fridman is the founder of the Alfa Group, one of Russia’s largest privately owned investment groups. Fridman is the second wealthiest man in Russia according to Forbes,
Fridman, who has been a member of the CFR, is also co-founder of the Russian Jewish Congress.
As reported by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Knut Royce and Nathaniel Heller, Alfa’s “roots are imbedded in a legacy of KGB and Communist Party corruption, as well as drug trafficking and organized crime funds, according to Russian and U.S. sources and documents.”
A former KGB major said that Alfa was founded with party and KGB funds, and soon attracted rogue agents who had served in anti-organized-crime units.
Alfa had allegedly been deeply involved in the early 1990s in the laundering of Russian and Colombian drug money and in trafficking drugs from the Far East to Europe.
Since the 1990’s, according to a document prepared by Stratfor of August 2, 2007, released by Wikileaks, Fridman has maintained ties to the Solntsevskaya Bratva, the largest and most powerful crime syndicate of the Russian mafia, where Simeon Mogilevich has been a senior figure.
The report describes Solntsevskaya as one of Russia's largest and most powerful organized crime associations, through funding from Alfa.
Solntsevskaya is a confederation of a half-dozen criminal groups often accused of drug-running, racketeering, money laundering and bribery. The organization is led by Sergei Mikhailov, widely considered to be one of the most dangerous and notorious gangsters in Russia. “Specifically, Alfa Group is now involved in transporting drugs from Southeast Asia through Russia into Europe, laundering money of Colombian drug cartels, and bribing organs of justice in Russia in order to keep the entire operation below law enforcement's radar.”
Viktor Vekselberg and Sir Leonard “Len” Blavatnik formed the Renova investment vehicle, and then the two joined with Fridman’s Alfa Group to form the AAR venture. Ukrainian-born billionaire Len Blavatnik, who was named Britain’s richest man in 2015, founded Access Industries which now owns Warner Music Group.
Blavatnik and Vekselberg hold their 15.8 percent joint stake in Oleg Deripaska’s RUSAL. According to Forbes magazine, Deripaska, who is considered by many to be a member of Putin’s inner circle, is Russia’s sixth-wealthiest man, with an estimated fortune of $13.3 billion.
2013-Russian mob boss Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov holds both Russian and Israeli citizenship, is one of the world’s most notorious Russian mafia bosses, known as “Little Taiwanese.” He is tied to Semion Mogilevich. In 2008, Forbes named him the world’s third most wanted, after Osama bin Laden and el Chapo. He is accused of the bribing of judges in the 2002 Winter Olympics, in which a Canadian figure-skating team were denied their gold medal.
Seven months after he was busted in 2013, he appeared near Trump in the VIP section of the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Tokhtakhounov operated out of Trump Tower, just three floors down from Trump’s penthouse, what prosecutors called “an international gambling business that catered to oligarchs residing in the former Soviet Union and throughout the world.”
The indictment against the gambling ring was filed by Preet Bharara, then the US attorney in Manhattan. Bharara earned a reputation of being a “crusader” prosecutor, who for seven years was one of “the nation’s most aggressive and outspoken prosecutors of public corruption and Wall Street crime.”
Following the 2016 election, Bharara claimed that Trump asked Bharara to remain as U.S. Attorney, and Bharara agreed to stay on. However, he was eventually fired after refusing to resign, as a result of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ request for all remaining U.S. Attorneys appointed during President Obama’s administration to resign.
Trump had reportedly personally sold five separate condos in Trump Tower to David Bogatin. David’s brother Jacob Bogatin was CEO of a fraudulent company, YBM Magnex International, supposedly a world-class manufacturer of industrial magnets, which was founded by the Mogilevich syndicate.
Trump uses a recruiter based in upstate New York, Peter Petrina, to find foreign workers for his resorts, golf clubs and vineyard. Petrina is of Romanian descent and has an office in Romania. Trump pursued more than 500 visas for foreign workers at Mar-a-Lago since 2010, while hundreds of domestic applicants failed to get the same jobs.
2013-Eager to discuss the possibilities of building Trump Tower Moscow, Donald Trump visited the Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov (referenced in the Steele dossier) in Moscow in November 2013.
He brought along Alex Sapir and Rotem Rosen as advisers. Rosen had been employed as the CEO for Africa-Israel USA, which is closely related to Leviev’s Africa-Israel Investments. Rosen has also been considered Leviev’s “right-hand man.”
Alex Sapir is the son of Tamir Sapir, now deceased, who allegedly sold electronics to the KGB from his Manhattan storefront. The elder Sapir also long funded Trump projects, including Trump Soho, through his company, Sapir Properties.
2013-September 12, UAE announces a plan to invest $5 billion in Russian infrastructure projects in a deal between Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) and the Abu Dhabi Department of Finance, marking the highest investment to Russia from the Emirates.
RDIF head Kirill Dmitriev and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan, the commander of the UAE’s army, signs a Memorandum of Cooperation which became official at the end of 2013.
2013 June, Schwarzman’s firm begins lending to the Kushner Companies. Over time, it will become one of the firm’s biggest lenders, providing more than $400 million in financing in four separate deals.
Blackstone, along with Deutsche Bank AG, provides loans for Kushner and CIM Group to purchase a Manhattan office building at 2 Rector Street.
2013 October, The Kushner Companies and real estate investment firm RFR purchase five of six Jehovah’s Witnesses warehouse and printing properties in Dumbo — an upscale Brooklyn neighborhood — for $375 million, in what becomes the borough’s largest transaction of the year. Natixis Real Estate Capital loans Kushner’s consortium, which included Blackstone, $249 million to finance the deal. (Blackstone was among the undisclosed partners.)
2013-DBTCA also had a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the pedophile and sex trafficker who died under suspicious circumstances after his arrest in July, 2019.
That relationship began in 2013, the same year Broeksmit was presented with the DBTCA breach report which documented massive liabilities to Russia.
Gazprombank publicly admits that DBTCA is their correspondent bank in America, though the full nature of the relationship between the two banks remains murky. Based on the breach report and the correspondent banking network, it appears that DBTCA was the bank of choice for the Russian government bank for both cash management and correspondent banking.
Banking experts suggested that Russia’s disproportionately large share of capital in DBTCA raised questions about why other banks were unwilling to manage their cash. Generally, financial experts indicated the relationship was an unusual one for the American subsidiary of a bank which demands more explanation from Deutsche Bank officials.
The breach report was sent to Bill Broeksmit on October 18, 2013 from his colleague Joseph Rice, who was serving as Deutsche Bank’s Treasurer for the Americas Region. Rice warned Broeksmit that DBTCA had reached its MCO limit, an acronym representing the bank’s Maximum Cumulative Outflow, “again on Friday.” Rice added that this was a “continuation of the same cause that I reported to you over the weekend.”
Section of the Deutsche Bank Trust Company (DBTC) breach report showing a €373 million/$511 million liability to Gazprombank.
DBTCA’s relationship with Gazprombank, wherein Gazprombank moved billions of rubles to DBTCA in order for them to exchange that to dollars, was by far its largest foreign liability to a state-owned bank; its next largest was to the National Bank of Egypt (€242 million/$331 million).
Most of the liabilities to Russia by the Deutsche Bank subsidiary were owed to private institutions, though at least $1 billion (at least 7.6% of DBTCA’s total liabilities) appeared to be to Russian-state controlled entities, with the majority of that to Gazprombank, VEB, and VTB.
It’s unclear if other Russian banks were using DBTCA for cash management, or why they ended up on the liabilities sheet.
Ilya Zaslavskiy, the Head of Research at the Free Russia Foundation, explained how Gazprombank has been used as a tool of the Kremlin, saying, “Gazprom and the government have control stake and have used this bank on multiple occasions for vested interests and special operations, like fake auctions of… assets or paying to Putin’s cronies for exaggerated contracts/deals.”
Private banks, especially in authoritarian countries such as Russia, are often also tools of the state even if they aren’t directly owned by the government.
In Russia, the Central Bank has frequently injected billions of dollars into private banks such as Promsvyazbank, to which DBTCA had a liability of approximately $230 million according to the breach report. The founders of Promsvyazbank have fled Russia and are currently being sought by Russian authorities for embezzlement.
Both Deutsche Bank and Gazprombank have faced a series of fines and regulatory actions after failing to stop Russian money laundering.
2013-Epstein had followed Bowers to Deutsche Bank , where – despite his allegedly defaulting on some $25 million in loans from Citigroup – Bowers secured further high-risk loans and credit lines for the convicted sex offender.
2013-Erik Prince sold a majority stake in FSG to the Chinese . His boss is now Chang Xhenming, who is very close to President Xi Jinping. Chang is also chair of China’s massive Citic Group. Prince is a former U.S. Navy Seal and a founder of Blackwater, a mercenary contractor.
FSG is one of the companies helping to build “re-training” camps for ethnic Uyghurs and other Muslim communities in China’s Xinjiang province. China detains 1 million people in those camps and keeps 13 million people under surveillance.
2013-Browder falsely accused Russian national Denis Katsyv of money laundering, alleging he received a mere $800,000 from Browder's non-existent Magnitsky- $230m Russian tax fraud. As it transpired, the entire case was provided by Browder, and under oath, Agent Todd Hyman, assisting the investigation, was forced to admit they never checked Browder’s evidence.
Browder had created a plan with then US Attorney Preet Bharara, to create a US legal precedent in case law, so that any Russian national named by Browder as associated with Magnitsky’s death or the fake tax fraud, could have their US property confiscated at will, just like the Magnitsky Act, no due process, no evidence required.
The US law firm, Baker-Hostetler, hired by Veselnitskaya on behalf of Denis Katsyv, had hired Glenn Simpson in 2013, to investigate Browder, long before the Steele engagement. As detailed in both his Senate and House testimonies, Simpson discovered that Browder’s Magnitsky story was full of unsubstantiated allegations and inconsistencies (thank Sen Feinstein for releasing Simpson’s testimony, the GOP Senators were protecting Browder).
Agalarovis a Moscow-based property developer who had won major contracts from Vladimir Putin’s government. He hosted Trump’s 2013 Miss Universe contest at his concert hall in Moscow. He orchestrated the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting and formed a new American shell company a month beforehand withthe help of the Russian lawyer who attended the meeting.
In 2015, Kushner and his family business, Kushner Cos., bought a portion of the New York Times building on West 43rd Street from Russian /Israeli real estate billionaire Lev Leviev for $295M, where $285M was borrowed from Deutsche Bank to complete the transaction, despite the 666 albatross hanging over Kushners head
Deutsche's Rosemary Vrablic arranged loans for Trump & prior to election, Deutsche funded $285 million for Jared Kushner to refinance loan on part of former NYT building bought from Lev Leviev whose company AFI is involved in Prevezon $ laundering case
Rosemary Vrablic started in banking in the mid 80’s with Israeli Bank Leumi where the Kushners were customers. Her boss Tom Bowers at Deutsche Bank handled Epsteins account which he had brought over from JP morgan after they stopped doing business with Epstein
Bowers was suicided shortly after Epsteins 2019 suicide
Deutsche Bank and two companies tied to Leviev, Africa Israel Investments and Prevezon, have all been the subject of money laundering investigations.
2014-Epstein, who was Donald Trump’s friend through the ’80s and ’90s until a falling out in early 2000’s , partnered in an Israeli start-up alongside former Israel Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
Epstein was brought in as an investor by Barak, his close friend of 17 years.
Epstein invested $1.5 million in a company (SUM) with Barak in 2014. All of that money went into Carbyne in 2015. Barak has since been a front-man for the company .
Barak has life-long ties to Israel’s spy services. Barak was seeking to unseat Benjamin Netanyahu as Israeli Prime Minister in the upcoming re-run elections
Since 2015, he has been the front-man for Carbyne, an Israeli start-up which purports to be a high-tech solution for 911 emergency call centers, but the platform’s architecture and investors raise serious privacy concerns.
CEO Amir Elichai served in Israel’s elite military intelligence group. Pinchas Berkus, a former Brigadier of the elite 8200 unit, is a company director. Lital Leshem, a co-founder, still serves as a reservist in the Israeli Defence Force. Alex Dizengof, the CTO, worked in cybersecurity for Israel’s Prime Minister’s office.
2014- Shortly before Broeksmit’s death , a small lender in Cyprus, Hellenic Bank, got suspicious. Someone from Russia had set up accounts with Hellenic, and obscene sums of money were pouring in.
That strange things were happening in Cyprus was not a shock. The island was a popular place for people with shady backgrounds to do their banking. Cyprus was part of both the European Union and the euro currency area, where government regulations were robust, so in theory, at least, Cyprus’s financial system was safer than in many other parts of the world. Yet the country also tended to do the absolute minimum when it came to blocking illicit transactions. By design, that made it a go-to destination for Russians and others searching for somewhere to hide ill-gotten cash.
Aside from its sunny weather, the laxity of its financial system and its integration into Europe were perhaps Cyprus’s biggest selling points.
It took a lot to make a Cypriot banker queasy, but nearly $700 million had flooded into these particular Russian bank accounts in a short period of time,and that did the trick.
Officials at Hellenic looked into where the money was coming from—a basic first step when conducting due diligence on such gigantic moneyflows—and saw that the source was Deutsche Bank.
This should have been a reassuring sign. For all its problems, Deutsche was a mainstream, heavily regulated European financial institution—not the kind of dodgy outfit likely to be involved in brazen money laundering.
But there was a protocol for Hellenic to follow in such situations. It asked Deutsche to explain its relationship with the Russian customer and the purpose of the transfers, as well as whether Deutsche had “any reason to believe that the transactions . . . are in any way of a suspicious nature.”
Deutsche probably could have put the matter to rest with a quick response, but instead it ignored the query. The next month, Hellenic sent a reminder. That, too, received no answer. A third inquiry followed in March. This time, the request was routed to a different part of Deutsche, and someone there directed it to another office, and that office in turn forwarded it on to Tim Wiswell in Moscow.
Wiz knew all about these transactions. The Russian customer was participating in mirror trades with Deutsche to extract rubles from Russia and convert them into dollars, using Deutsche’s U.S. operations—DBTCA—as a Laundromat. Then the dollars were being zapped over to Cyprus, where the Russian beneficiary could do with the money as he pleased—except for the fact that Hellenic had now grown suspicious.
Wiz needed to quell the concerns; otherwise Deutsche and its client would have to find another, less scrupulous destination for the freshly laundered funds. Wiz assured Hellenic that Deutsche had thoroughly vetted the customer and saw “no reason for concern here.”
Hellenic, however, was not satisfied. Apparently realizing that the money was being routed through the United States, which had a reputation for imposing crippling penalties on institutions that violated American law, it sent a final inquiry. This one went to a DBTCA employee in New York who was in charge of protecting against financial crime inside the bank.
As Broeksmit had warned months earlier,DBTCA was so short-staffed that it didn’t have its own chief financial officer or compliance team. And sure enough, the internal cop never responded or looked into the matter. He would later explain to regulators that he had been too busy“
It wouldn’t be until October 2014—that Deutsche’s headquarters would realize that there was a massive Russian money-laundering scheme operating out of its Moscow outpost,with a helping hand,perhaps unwitting, from the bank’s London and New York offices.
A year after Hellenic Bank had first flagged the suspicious transactions, Deutsche alerted regulators in multiple countries to what it had uncovered.
Government investigations were launched in the United States and Britain, and they eventually would find that Wiz’s wife had offshore bank accounts with what looked like millions of dollars she had received from Russians, at least some of which had originated with the bank’s mirror-trading clients and paid to her via DBTCA. (Wiz also sometimes received bags of cash.)
Broeksmit’s concerns about DBTCA’s laxity were proving prescient.
2014-The Senate’s report was unveiled with fanfare in July , paired with congressional hearings—just as the co-head of Renaissance, Robert Mercer, was beginning to bankroll a series of right-wing initiatives,such as Breitbart News,aimed at upending the Western political order.
Senator Carl Levin, the chairman of the investigations committee,convened the first public hearing at 9:30 one July morning in the Hart Senate Office Building.
Levin and Roach had plotted lines of questioning with the witnesses. One of them was Deutsche’s Satish Ramakrishna. Nearly four hours into the hearing, Ramakrishna claimed not to know much about the trades’ tax-avoiding purpose. “Did you ever have a conversation with a man named Broeksmit?” Levin demanded.
Ramakrishna acknowledged the phone call had taken place but insisted that Bill was merely observing that taxes were one of many reasons for the trades.
2014 trump and Ivanka sat down with Rosemary Vrablic. The banker and her superiors were willing to dole out more money—at the exact time that their star client was delving further into demagoguery.. In case Deutsche was on the fence, Vrablic had persuaded Trump to sweeten the deal by informally agreeing to stash tens of millions of dollars more in Deutsche accounts,an arrangement that generated substantial fees for the bank. Vrablic noted the tacit quid pro quo in her write-up of the loan as she sought sign-off from her superiors.
Helping seal the deal’s outcome was the fact that Vrablic’s higher-ups perceived her and Anshu as having a strong bond.
Deutsche—via DBTCA—soon agreed to lend $170 million to Trump Old Post Office LLC, a newly incorporated company in Delaware. The loan didn’t have to be fully paid back for a decade, but Trump was personally on the hook for most of the money; if he defaulted, Deutsche could come after his personal assets.
Like the Doral loan, whose low interest rate had stunned Rich Byrne, the Old Post Office transaction was surprisingly in-expensive for a borrower whose credit history was scarred by repeated defaults.“I’m borrowing money at numbers like 2 percent,” Trump exclaimed to the journalist William Cohan. “It’s crazy! I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Like the prior loans, it was written up in a report that was sent to members of the DBTCA oversight board. Directors had the authority to summon executives to explain why on earth they were shoveling so much money in Trump’s direction, especially when no other bank dared touch him. But nobody asked questions.
2014-Deutsche’s work by now extended well beyond loans to Donald Trump and his company. In 2009, Trump’s son Don Jr. had started a company, Titan Atlas Manufacturing, that he bragged would revolutionize the prefab-home industry. By 2011, the business was unraveling. Don Jr. turned to Vrablic for help, and Deutsche coughed up a nearly $4 million mortgage, repayable in three years.
That preserved for a short while the fantasy of Don Jr. as a not-unsuccessful businessman. Days before the loan’s due date,the elder Trump used a specially created LLC—DB Pace Acquisitions—to buy the loan from Deutsche Bank (hence theDB).
This was yet another favor to Trump—normal bank customers couldn’t just walk in and purchase a family member’s problematic loan. When Don Jr. predictably defaulted, DB Pace foreclosed on the warehouse, thus keeping it in the hands of the Trump family and out of reach of Titan Atlas’s other creditors.
The Kushners started receiving personal loans from Vrablic’s department, too. This had been impossible for years because Charles Kushner, Jared’s father, had been convicted of tax evasion and witness tampering (he would be pardoned by President Trump)
Even as a lender as uninterested in its clients’ reputation as Deutsche was, the family patriarch’s incarceration had made the entire family essentially off-limits. But Vrablic and Ivanka had grown tight—they weren’t quite friends, but they saw a lot of each other at social events—and she’d known Jared Kushner since before her arrival at Deutsche.
Vrablic started bringing Deutsche executives along to meet him, impressing them with their easy,familiar rapport.
Jared returned the favor. He owned The New York Observer, an influential weekly tabloid, and soon it was apparently being used as alever with Deutsche.
One top investment-banking executives who had lobbied against lending to Trump was pretty sure that a series of negative stories about him in the Observer had been planted by a longtime Deutsche rival who happened to be close to the Kushner and Trump families.
2014 March 17 President Obama announces sanctions against high-ranking Russian officials for Russian annexation of Crimea.
July 17, 2014 President Obama announces further sanctions against Russian banks, energy and defense companies relative to the Russian incursion of Crimea.
2014-NICOSIA, Cyprus — The Swiss banker , Josef Ackermann played a role in the events that nearly destroyed the Cyprus banking system in 2013. Now he was back in this sleepy capital, toiling to fix one of the very banks he helped undermine.
Redemption, said Mr. Ackermann, the former Deutsche Bank chief, would be too strong a word to describe why he, once one of the most powerful bankers in the world, agreed to be chairman of the Bank of Cyprus — the Mediterranean island’s largest lender, but puny in global terms.
In his office at bank headquarters in Nicosia — which is comfortable but not nearly as grand as his office was at Deutsche Bank — Mr. Ackermann said, “If I could give something back to the people or society, I would like to do that.” He receives what, by investment banking standards, is token compensation of 68,000 euros per year. He said he had no options or other ways to profit from the bank’s recovery, if it happened.
But the bank and the island’s economy are so closely intertwined that if Mr. Ackermann, 67, helps revive the bank, he will also help revive the country, whose problems were briefly at the epicenter of global financial market anxiety in 2013.
And Mr. Ackermann would perhaps enhance his own legacy, which has lost some of its sheen since he left Deutsche Bank in 2012.
At Deutsche Bank, Mr. Ackermann led the institution to the top echelons of investment banking. But it has since struggled to maintain that status as regulators have pressed banks to reduce risk.
His successor, Anshu Jain, has already resigned under pressure.
Subsequently, Mr. Ackermann was a part-time chairman of Zurich Insurance, a position that ended badly after its chief financial officer committed suicide, leaving behind a note that blamed Mr. Ackermann for his despair. An investigation by Swiss regulators absolved Mr. Ackermann of blame, but he resigned and has kept a low profile since.
Mr. Ackermann says he does not have a bad conscience. “By no means,” he said. “I think we did a lot of good things.”
But, he said, “I want to demonstrate that we cannot only make money for ourselves, but also that banking is actually something which is a main contributor to the prosperity of society at large.”
Though Bank of Cyprus is the largest lender on the island by far, its 25 billion euros, or about $28 billion, in assets would be a rounding error at Deutsche Bank, which has more than a trillion euros in assets. If the Bank of Cyprus were in the United States, it would be a midsize regional bank, slightly smaller than the Bank of Oklahoma.
In addition to Mr. Ackermann, the Bank of Cyprus has attracted a surprising number of financial industry heavyweights to the island, which has a population of about 1.2 million and is geographically closer to the Middle East than to Europe.
Its main investors include Wilbur L. Ross Jr., an American billionaire who specializes in buying distressed assets, and who late last year persuaded Mr. Ackermann to oversee Bank of Cyprus.
The Renova Group, a Russian conglomerate controlled by Viktor Vekselberg, one of Russia’s most powerful businessmen, is the bank’s largest foreign shareholder, with a 6.2 percent stake. Mr. Ackermann also has connections to Renova; he is a member of the board of a unit that controls the company’s holdings outside Russia.
John Hourican, the chief executive of Bank of Cyprus since 2013, is another top manager with an international reputation in need of polishing. Mr. Hourican was formerly head of investment banking at Royal Bank of Scotland, one of Britain’s largest banks.
Mr. Hourican left R.B.S. in early 2013 after some of its traders were found to be involved in a conspiracy to fix benchmark interest rates. Mr. Hourican was not directly implicated, but he took responsibility and resigned.
There are many reasons so many prominent names have come to Cyprus. One is simply to make a profit. Mr. Ross tripled his money investing in the Bank of Ireland, a commercial bank, when its ability to survive was in doubt during the financial crisis. If all goes well, the Bank of Cyprus could produce a similar payoff.
For others, motivation includes a measure of absolution, even penitence. Mr. Hourican said that the chance to make amends drew him from London to the comparative obscurity of Cyprus. “I don’t think we can shy away from being collectively responsible” for the financial crisis, Mr. Hourican said. “It is nice to come along and actually be able to fix the mistakes that did get made in places like Cyprus.”
Not that all Cypriots appreciated the effort. “They did burn my car,” Mr. Hourican recalled.
Mr. Hourican was away last March when several arsonists, who have not been identified, set the vehicle aflame after dousing it with gasoline.
“It was a bit of sending a message to the bank: ‘We’re still angry.’ I understand that,” Mr. Hourican said, “but I’d prefer if you hadn’t torched my car.”
This incident is not the reason he has decided to leave the Cyprus job in November, Mr. Hourican says. Rather, he wants to be closer to his wife and four children, who have continued to live primarily in their native Ireland, he says.
The anger of some Cypriots is not surprising. Thousands of people lost money after their deposits were seized in 2013 to cover losses that the Cyprus banks absorbed on their holdings of Greek bonds. Some of the depositors were Russians stashing their money abroad, but many were Cypriots.
Ironically, the losses were partly Mr. Ackermann’s work. As chairman of the International Institute of Finance — an industry group that represents the interests of large investment banks like Deutsche, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — he played a primary role in negotiating an agreement that provided crucial debt relief for Greece.
A shop in the old city of Nicosia. The near collapse of Cyprus’s banking system exacted a toll on the island’s residents, some of whom remain angry.
The deal caused enormous collateral damage in Cyprus, because banks here had invested heavily in Greek government debt, which lost about half its value. Cyprus Popular Bank, also known as Laiki Bank, the island’s second-largest lender, collapsed and was absorbed by Bank of Cyprus.
The recession that came after the Cyprus banking crisis, as well as a real estate bubble, left it with the highest rate of delinquent loans in the world. More than half of all its outstanding loans are considered nonperforming.
Under pressure from the European Union, the Cyprus Parliament passed laws this year that will streamline the island’s laborious foreclosure procedures. The changes will make it easier for the Bank of Cyprus to repossess property from borrowers who are in arrears, which is critical to dealing with the bad-loan problem.
But it will be tricky for the bank to use its new powers without generating enormous ill will. Mr. Ross, the American distressed-asset investor, says that the bank prefers to work out amicable settlements with borrowers and that it has no interest in seizing property when the real estate market is already depressed.
“There aren’t going to be mass foreclosures,” Mr. Ross, who also serves on the Bank of Cyprus board as vice chairman, said by telephone. “If there are mass foreclosures, it would mean vast amounts of houses on the market at the same time, and that’s not a good thing in terms of realizing your value.”
Under Mr. Ackermann and Mr. Hourican, Bank of Cyprus has reduced its dependence on emergency loans from the European Central Bank, cut costs and decreased its dependence on borrowed money. Profits fell 26 percent in the first half of this year, to €60 million on revenue of €533 million, as the bank increased the amount of money it set aside to cover losses on bad loans. However, the total number of bad loans has started to decline for the first time since before the crisis began.
The bank will probably also benefit from a recent upturn in the Cyprus economy, and the potential influx of wealth from newly discovered offshore deposits of natural gas. And the economy could collect a substantial peace dividend if current talks are successful in reuniting the Greek-speaking part of the island with an enclave in the north that has been occupied by Turkey since 1974.
But Mr. Ackermann said the turnaround of the bank would take another two or three years. “We are certainly not yet there,” he said. Mr. Ackermann’s said it does not bother him that, if the turnaround succeeds, he would not share in the payoff beyond his 68,000 euro pay as bank chairman.
“I don’t need charity,” he said. “I made enough money in my life.”
An interesting side not is that 2 years after buying a Mansion owned by Trump, in 2010 Rybolovlev bought a 9.7% stake in , Bank of Cyprus
Rybolovlev's investment in Bank of Cyprus followed significant financial dealings in the country.
In 2012, he acquired Cypriot citizenship upon becoming an investor in Bank of Cyprus
Following the country's deep recession, on 25 March 2013 the Eurogroup agreed with the government of Cyprus that the Bank of Cyprus would take over the remnants of Laiki Bank. To finance the deal and save Bank of Cyprus from bankruptcy, it was also decided that accounts over €100,000 would suffer a haircuton their assets of about 50%, which mostly wiped out Rybolovlev's stake and ended his involvement in the Bank with a $600 million loss.
2014-Trasta Komercbanka was a Latvian-located financial institution that played a prominent money-laundering role in the Prevezon forfeiture case and in other cases involving the so-called Global Laundromat.
Deutsche Bank acted as a “correspondent bank” for Trasta until 2015, according to an article in the Guardian. This meant that Deutsche provided dollar-denominated services to Trasta’s non-residential Russian clients.
This service was used to move money from Latvia to banks across the world. In 2014, only two Western lenders were willing to accept international dollar transfers from Latvian banks — Deutsche Bank and Germany’s Commerzbank.
Latvia’s deputy finance minister, Maija Treija, said the money sent via Trasta was “either stolen or with criminal origin.” The now-defunct bank was used as a vehicle to get money out of the former Soviet Union and “into the EU financial system,” she added.
According to a 2014 article by bne IntelliNews, Trasta Komercbanka was co-owned by Igors Buimisters and Ivan Fursin — a one-time member of the Russian Parliament for the “Party of Regions.” Latvian financial market regulators believe Fursin indirectly controlled between 20 and 33 percent of Trasta.
Fursin is a junior partner of Ukraine’s gas and chemical oligarch Dmitry Firtash in the gas trading company Rosukrenergo, which has handled Ukrainian gas imports from Turkmenistan since 2005, and has been the subject of multiple investigations. The article further notes that Firtash and Fursin also own Ukrainian lender Nadra Bank and Misto Bank, and share partnership interests in other gas-related companies.
These connections take on importance in light of the recent Paul Manafort money-laundering indictment, which lists multiple financial transactions relative to a Cyprus shell company called Lucicle Consultants.
A July 19, 2017 New York Times article, while noting that the precise ownership of Lucicle is unclear, links Ivan Fursin with Lucicle through an offshore entity called Mistaro Ventures, listed on a government form that Fursin filed in Ukraine.
Mistaro transferred millions to Lucicle in February 2012 shortly before Lucicle made a $9.9 million unsecured loan to Jesand LLC, a Delaware shell company that Paul Manafort used to buy real estate in New York.
The Daily Beast, in an 11/02/17 article w
ritten by Betsy Woodruff, was able to link Fursin to Russian organized crime — quoting an expert in that area who indicated that Fursin was a senior figure in the Semion Mogilevich crime organization.
Mogilevich is known as the Vor of Vors of Russian organized crime, and is referred to as “the brainy don.” Firtash has publicly acknowledged that he owes his start in the gas business to Mogilevich, who was at one time listed as one of the FBI’s most wanted criminals.
And Fursin chaired the Ukrainian anti-money-laundering committee from 2012 to 2014.
No one has conclusively connected Donald Trump — or any of his family — to any Deutsche Bank money laundering, or bogus tax shelter activities, to this point.
But will the DOJ investigation aggressively pursue that possibility should it ultimately surface in the mirror trades probe or any other probe currently open? Who will make that decision?
2014- Felix Sater, who met Rebbe Schneerson several times as a child, was named Man of the Year by Chabad of Port Washington, NY. The award was presented by Sater’s rabbi, Shalom Paltiel, Port Washington Chabad’s founder. Paltiel is also close to “Putin’s rabbi” Berel Lazar, calling Lazar “my dear friend and mentor.”
Sater’s Bayrock Group was based in Trump Tower. Two former executives of Bayrock claimed in a lawsuit that the company’s real purpose was to develop hugely expensive properties bearing the Trump brand, and then use the projects to launder money and evade taxes.
Bayrock was founded by New York property developer Tevfik Arif, a Kazakh-born citizen of Turkey with a Muslim name, who is among Port Washington Chabad’s top 13 benefactors.