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Or so, the many many shell companies, the all-cash deals, and the pattern of opacity — all say to financial investigators: The WHY is most likely Money Laundering.
The on-going denials and sycophancy say: Most likely from deep-pockets Russians.
I stumbled across this story, and it got me thinking: What about that boondoggle known as Turnberry, now the Trump Turnberry Resort? How was that Trump Deal done?
Just how in the world did Trump Org manage to buy and renovate this $300 Million money-pit, anyways?
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Where Did Donald Trump Get Two Hundred Million Dollars to Buy His Money-Losing Scottish Golf Club?
by Adam Davidson, Swamp Chronicles, The New Yorker -- July 13, 2018
Between meeting the Queen of England and Vladimir Putin, President Trump will spend this weekend at Turnberry, the golf course he bought in 2014 and rechristened Trump Turnberry. This property has not received the attention it deserves. It is, by far, the biggest investment the Trump Organization has made in years. It is so much bigger than his other recent projects that it would not be unreasonable to describe the Trump Organization as, at its core, a manager of a money-losing Scottish golf course that is kept afloat with funds from licensing fees and decades-old real-estate projects.
No doubt, the President will be excited to visit. After buying the property for more than sixty million dollars, he then spent a reported hundred and fifty million pounds—about two hundred million dollars total—remaking the site, adding a new course, rehabbing an old one, and fixing up the lodgings. It is possible, though, that he will have some harsh words for his staff. The Turnberry has been losing an astonishing amount of money, including twenty-three million dollars in 2016. The Trump Organization argued that these losses were the result of being closed for several months for repair. However, revenue for the months it was open were so low—about $1.5 million per month—that it is hard to understand how the property will ever become profitable, let alone so successful that it will pay back nearly three hundred million dollars in investment and losses.
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However, the portfolio of assets that Trump owns does not suggest that he would have so much money that he can casually spend a few hundred million on a whim. Much of his wealth is tied up in properties that lose money or are not especially profitable. A comprehensive analysis by the Wall Street Journal, in 2016, concluded that Trump brought in about a hundred and sixty million dollars in income a year. [...] There simply isn’t enough money coming into Trump’s known businessto cover the massive outlay he spent on Turnberry.
Hey, Donald you could clear up all this palace intrigue — by simply turning over your Profit and Loss books on Turnberry — and all the annoying $$$ investigations just might go away.
That is of course, if he can even track down the books, with all the layers of Shell Companies, obscuring [protecting] the Trump Turnberry stakeholders …
IFTRUMP IS LAUNDERING RUSSIAN MONEY, HERE’S HOW IT WORKS
by Garrett M. Graff, Business, wired.com-- May 11, 2018
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But to Treasury officials and law enforcement who have long pursued money laundering and terrorist financing probes, it’s not what Donald Trump or Michael Cohen did in any single transaction that raises red flags—it’s how they conducted business day in and day out. The layers of shell companies, the contracts involving pseudonyms, the law firm cut-outs to make deals."Many of the activities, when viewed in aggregate, point to a deliberate attempt to create opacity,” says Amit Sharma, who used to work on countering terrorist financing after 9/11 at the Treasury Department. “When you take two steps back, you see a murkiness and level of complexity with which the Cohen and Trump companies have operated—what are they hiding? Why are secondary and tertiary entities signing under pseudonyms and ‘cover' names? Truly legitimate, transparent companies don’t need to do that. [...]
Yet while regulations—especially since 9/11—require in-depth documentation and identification for basic banking for individuals, it has been much easier—until literally today—for corporate entities to hide their identities behind lawyers and shell companies. “Financial institutions are mandated to collect all this data on its customers, but up until now, financial institutions have not had to do the same for companies,” Sharma says. “For companies, often it has simply been the business location and Tax ID number and we don’t know the underlying ownership. We don’t know whether it’s a Russian oligarch.” (In fact, new Treasury Department rules that require stronger due diligence on banks to understand who actually owns—or has a controlling interest in—a company only come into effect today, May 11, 2018.)
As Sharma says, “Trump and his companies have exercised this practice for many years—it seems that every new project, every product, every new building, he’s starting a new company or legal entity to manage it. This has been the case for overseas operations and activities as well. [...]
In 2016 The Wall Street Journal's Jean Eaglesham, Mark Maremont, and Lisa Schwartz outlined a specific example of just that sort of structure: “Donald Trump owns a helicopter in Scotland. To be more precise, he has a revocable trust that owns 99 percent of a Delaware limited liability company that owns 99 percent of another Delaware LLC that owns a Scottish limited company that owns another Scottish company that owns the 26-year-old Sikorsky S-76B helicopter, emblazoned with a red ‘TRUMP’ on the side of its fuselage.”All told, the Journal reported, 15 entities were used at that point to “own” Trump’s fleet of two airplanes and three helicopters.
Layer on layer of corporate structure makes it hard for investigators, tax officials, or prying lawyers to figure out who owns what, the underlying source of money for specific transactions, whether taxes are being appropriately paid in a given jurisdiction, or who might be partners in what enterprises.
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Lest we forget, a relatively conservative news organization came to this startling conclusion, midway into the Trump Denial-dynasty …
Buyers connected to Russia or former Soviet republics made 86 all-cash sales—totaling nearly $109 million—at 10 Trump-branded properties in South Florida and New York City, according to a new analysis shared with McClatchy. Many of them made purchases using shell companies designed to obscure their identities.
McClatchydc.com — June 19, 2018
Say what!? Where did THAT story-line go …
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SOOO, WHY is the “Transparent one” blocking any release of his Financial Records (including his Taxes) — which might give the world a much better insightinto his ‘stellar Business genius’?
Well besides, THE FACT that opening his books would also disclose the way he ‘games the Tax-system’ — the way his Fixer-Lawyer explained in detail to Congress — Trump might just have too much “skin” in these international scams, to let them ever see the light of day now. He might end up losing even more than the presidency, if ever the silent Turnberry underwriters (et al.) were made as plain as day, on his internationaltap-dance stage.
Please do recall, as we as as a Nation, were shockingly informed by former Wall Street News researcher and reporter…
Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, testified that Trump’s [golf] courses may have been money laundering sitesfor the Russian mafia.
“As we pieced together the early years of [Trump’s] biography, it seemed as if during the early part of his career he had connections to a lot of Italian mafia figures, and then gradually during the 90s became associated with Russian mafia figures,” Simpson testified.
[...]Congress investigated links between Russian mafia, Trump golf courses
by Dylan Dethier, www.golf.com — Jan 19, 2018
With financial friends like that, who can afford “real transparency” anyhow? Certainly not DJ Trump.
Well here’s a few highlights of that eye-opening Simpson testimony to the House Intel Committee. Testimony in fact, which was only “released publicly” immediately after the Democrats regained control of the House.
[I’m just echoing here the 1st two significant blocks: to my search for “mafia”. But much of it is worth scanning, if you want to know what the GOP was hiding, from the American public, stuff that they learned way back on November 14, 2017 ...]
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UNCLASSIFIED, COMMITTEE SENSITIVE
EXECUTIVE SESSION
PERMANENT SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE,
U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,
WASHINGTON, D.C.
INTERVIEW OF: GLENN SIMPSON
Tuesday, November 14, 2017
Washington, D.C.
pg 23-24 (pdf) [emphasis added]
MR. SIMPSON: As I said, I mean, we've done other things together. And over - well, at the very beginning of this project, one of the very first things that I focused on was Donald Trump's relationship with a convicted racketeer named Felix Sater, and who was alleged to have an organized crime, Russian organized crime background.
And over the course of the first phase of this or the first project, we developed a lot of additional information suggesting that the company that Donald Trump had been associated with and Felix Sater, Bayrock, was engaged in illicit financial business activity and had organized crime connections.
We also had sort of more broadly learned that Mr. Trump had long time associations with Italian organized crime figures. And as we pieced together the early years of his biography, it seemed as if during the early part of his career he had connections to a lot of Italian mafia figures, and then gradually during the nineties became associated with Russian mafia figures.
And so all of that had developed by the spring of 2016 to the point where it was not a speculative piece of research; it was pretty well-established. And Mr. Trump had, quite memorably, attempted to downplay his relationship with Mr. Sater in ways that found, frankly, suspicious and not credible. Saying he wouldn't recognize him on the street, but there were pictures of them together.
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pg 36-38 (pdf) [emphasis added]
MR. SCHIFF: You mentioned that you'd done a lot of work as a journalist in terms of Russian organized crime, financial crimes, organized crime more generally. What can you tell us about how the Russians launder their money and whether that was an issue of concern during the first phase of your work for Free Beacon?
MR. SIMPSON: I guess the general thing I would say is that, you know; the Russians are far more sophisticated in their criminal organized crime activities than the Italians, and they're a lot more global. They understand finance a lot better. And so they tend to use quite elaborate methods to move money.
You know, obviously, the offshore system has grown in sophistication in the last decade or so, too, so they've taken advantage of that. Things that I had wrote about involved laundering money through security straits, laundering money through fake arbitrations in court, laundering money through commodities deals.
I mean, if you can think of a way to launder money, the Russians are pretty good at it. But they specifically understand financial markets. So I think I can tell you all of that.
I can tell you also that the Russians are much more integrated in the way they operate with the political -- the sort of legitimate business structures. So you don't find too many Italian mafia guys who are major shareholders in big media companies, but you definitely can find Russian mafia guys who are big shareholders in international media companies.
So the only way that — well, the thing that comes to mind, of course, is the real estate deals. And, you know, it did come to our attention during this, you know, first round or this first part of the project that there were a lot of real estate deals where you couldn't really tell who was buying the property. And sometimes properties would be bought and sold, and they would be bought for one price and sold for a loss shortly thereafter, and it didn't really make sense to us.
And we had done a lot of work for previous investigations on people buying condos in order to get visas under the EB-5 program. So we were very familiar with a pattern of corruption and illicit finance related to purchasing of condos.
MR. SCHIFF: Did you find evidence of that with respect to Mr. Trump?
MR. SIMPSON: I think a lot of what we found is subsequently - there have been similar articles published. "Evidence," I think, is a strong word. I think we saw patterns of buying and selling that we thought were suggestive of money laundering.
I think what I was saying to Mr. Gowdy about sort of, you know, because we are not law enforcement, we don't have compulsory power, and we also don't have, you know — we're not lawyers, or prosecutors, or even special — even secret agents.
Generally, we find patterns of things, and then if it seems like it's potentially a law enforcement matter then we would turn it over to law enforcement. Or, you know, if it's enough to write a story, we would give it to a journalist.
MR. SCHIFF: And, in this case, what facts came to your attention that concerned you that the buying and selling of properties — the buying and selling of Trump properties might indicate money laundering?
MR. SIMPSON: There was -- well, for one thing, there was various criminals were buying the properties. [...]
That was the long version of America’s cartoon villain, we love to hate.
Here is the much more, cut-to-the-chase shorter version of this democracy hijack story …
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Here’s the WHY that devious Donald demands the-exact-opposite-of Transparency in all his Business dealings. The long and short it is, he is very very very probably — a Crook. A Businessman-crook of extraordinary dimensions … (take it from Cohen, Trump’s fed-up facilitator in Crime).
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And 1 last reason, as to WHY Occupant Trump is fighting like hell to block any release of his Financial Records (includingthe presidential audit of his Taxes, required by Law) — Well let’s let the Trump Org brain trust, let us in on their not-so little OPM secret …
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If it was true back then…
What in the world, makes it “fake news” now?
Besides Team Trump’s desperate need for on-going Cover-ups of all things illegal… that Team Trump has done. And will continue to do.
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PS. What is the state-of-play, on this long-forgotten, story of the Trump Org’s ‘financial shell games’ overseas?
Well here’s the latest, as of a two months ago:
Trump’s Bid to Block Deutsche Bank Subpoena Shifts to Higher Court
by Bob Van Voris, bloomberg.com -- June 18, 2019
Congress’s battle for Donald Trump’s financial records shifted into one of the nation’s most important courts as the president asked a federal appeals panel in Manhattan to block House Democrats from getting his records from Deutsche Bank AG and Capital One Financial Corp.
Trump’s lawyers on Tuesday filed their opening legal brief with the court, asking it to reverse a lower-court ruling that denied his request to block subpoenas from House committees to the banks. Trump claims the subpoenas seek “an enormous volume of documents, reaching back decades,” requiring information about transactions by Trump and his employees and children.
Trump has said the subpoenas are an improper, politically motivated attempt by Democrats to fish for embarrassing material in advance of the 2020 election.
[...]
Well, isn’t some fishing required — when Washington DC becomes occupied by the nation’s deepest, darkest swamp … ?
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PSS. Next question: How in the world is all this Shell Game tax-avoidance opacity even Legal, anyways?
Inquiring Reporters should really want to know. (Average voters too.)
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