Days after Trump spoke to Argentina’s president his .. project picked up steam

Source: Quartz | November 23, 2016 | Max de Haldevang

Days after Trump spoke to Argentina’s president his stalled Buenos Aires tower project picked up steam

Twitter briefly went wild on Nov. 21, with a story alleging that president-elect Donald Trump had pressured Argentinian president Mauricio Macri to push through a stalled project for a Trump Tower in Buenos Aires in a phone call a week earlier.

The story—soon denied by Macri’s office—was poorly sourced, and soon left behind by the news cycle, in favor of Macri’s announcement that Trump’s daughter Ivanka had also been on the call. The story came from Argentinian daily La Nación, which was writing up an appearance by a well-known TV journalist who ambiguously started his story by saying he was “half joking, half serious” and didn’t give a source.

However, news and reports surrounding the phone call leave a lot of questions, particularly given the widespread concerns around Trump’s conflicts of interest.

Three days after the phone call between Trump and Macri on Nov.14, Trump’s associates at Buenos Aires firm YY Development Group announced that the construction project would go ahead, in an interview with La Nación (link in Spanish). The tower’s construction had reportedly been held up for years, for various reasons, with YY Development actively restarting construction permit requests when pro-business Macri took over from statist former president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner in Jan. 2016.

There’s nothing substantive to confirm that the phone call and construction announcement are linked, but local news media have reported that the call itself was arranged in very unusual fashion. Macri, who is son of one of Latin America’s richest men and has reportedly known Trump since beating him at golf in the 1980s, had backed the wrong horse at the election, openly supporting Hillary Clinton. Accordingly, a crisis meeting was called to work out how to put relations on the right track (Spanish language) with Trump’s administration.

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