The Oligarch Files: Did a billionaire fertiliser baron bail out Trump by…

Source: UK Daily Mail | March 11, 2017 | James S Henry

The Oligarch Files: Did a billionaire fertiliser baron bail out Trump by paying millions over the odds for this gaudy pleasure palace? And is THIS the Russian connection that could return to haunt the presidency?

Last summer, the bulldozers moved in to demolish America’s most expensive private home.

The Maison de l’Amitie, a gaudy 33,000 sq ft French Regency-style mansion on six prime acres with 475 ft of waterfront in Florida’s Palm Beach was subdivided and the first lot sold at a substantial loss.

At first glance, the sad fate of the grandiose building – it had 18 bedrooms, 22 bathrooms, a ballroom, art gallery and 50-car garage – is an indictment of the American property bubble, whose sudden collapse in 2008 led to the worldwide financial crisis.

But the story of the Maison de l’Amitie is much more than that. It is another striking example of President Donald Trump’s connections to Moscow and Russian money – and comes against a background of potentially devastating claims from elsewhere.

Trumps’s election campaign was bedevilled by allegations of links with the Kremlin and financiers who owe loyalty to Vladimir Putin.

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Mr Trump has dismissed the furore over Russian links as ‘fake news’, reiterating that he has ‘no business deals in Russia’.

Strictly speaking, that might be correct – if we overlook his £11 million deal to take Miss Universe to Moscow in 2013. But the real question is not about deals ‘in Russia’, but about his relationship with Russians, including oligarchs from former Soviet states.

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Close scrutiny of The Donald’s business history now suggests that if there is a real concern about Russian connections, it may instead lie in hard financial facts and figures.

In particular, the story of the Maison de l’Amitie, goes to the heart of President Trump’s good fortune in keeping his property empire afloat despite a very mixed business track record.

This embraces six corporate bankruptcies, numerous failed limited partnerships and the widely reported refusal of every leading Wall Street bank except Deutsche Bank to lend to him after his 1990s casino ventures in Atlantic City repeatedly went bust.

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Since at least the late 1990s, it appears that Trump may indeed have been doing business with the abundant new sources of global finance, including figures from kleptocracies such as Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union. As his son Donald Trump Jr told a Manhattan real estate conference in 2008: ‘Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.’

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Trump owed it £32.5 million after personally guaranteeing a loan to a failing hotel project in Chicago. He missed a major payment date and stalled for time by suing the bank, claiming that the financial crash was an ‘Act of God’.

Then, a buyer turned up for his Florida mansion in the shape of oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev, a 41-year-old former cardiologist who had secured the rights to Russia’s vast potash fertiliser reserves after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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‘There are a lot of suggestions that Rybolovlev drastically overpaid for this property,’ said lawyer David Newman, partner in Sills, Cummis & Gross of New York, who represented Rybolovlev’s wife Elena in her divorce from the Russian oligarch. ‘If you look at the four years between Trump’s purchase and his sale to Rybolovlev, there were very few things that increased that much in value.

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It is notoriously difficult for Russians with that scale of wealth to continue to prosper without the approval of the political establishment – and that usually means the new tsar himself. Oligarchs such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky who have rebelled against Putin have been imprisoned. Others, such as Boris Berezovsky, have met unexplained deaths.

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For Trump, it was a potentially life-saving cash injection that let him stave off Deutsche Bank and avoid having to dump his very best New York buildings –Trump Tower and 40 Wall Street – at firesale prices. At the very least, it looks as though Trump owes Dmitry Rybolovlev a little gratitude.

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This is where a second intriguing connection between Rybolovlev and Trump comes in, this time through the President’s new Commerce Secretary. In July 2014, Wilbur Ross and his investment group bought a 17 per cent stake in the Bank of Cyprus – one of the key havens for Russian finance and an offshore financial nexus of Russian oligarchs and ‘friends of Putin’. Ross became the bank’s co-chairman.

His fellow investors have included Vladimir Strzhalkovsky, said to be a former KGB agent and a long-time Putin associate, and Viktor Vekselberg, reportedly the seventh wealthiest Russian.

The links between Ross and Trump are strong, going back to at least the early 1990s, when he helped to salvage one of Trump’s failing Atlantic City casinos.

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Then, in 2014 at the age of 77, Wilbur Ross decided to get involved in the Cyprus bank.

In fact, he has played a very active role recruiting its senior management team, especially its board chairman, Josef Ackermann, a long-time former chairman of Deutsche Bank which has a history of doing business with… Donald Trump.

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It is now acknowledged that Ackermann’s tenure at Deutsche Bank was a period of spectacular chicanery. This includes anything from sanctions busting, interest rate rigging, and mortgage fraud to facilitating tax dodging, illicit trading, illegal foreclosures, rigging energy markets and laundering Russian money, which has since resulted in it facing fines and settlements totalling £16 billion.

From 2002 to 2012, under Ackermann, Deutsche Bank had become Trump’s largest bank creditor by far, with more than £530 million of loans to the Trump Organization and even more to other Trump partnerships. Trump’s 2016 financial disclosures show the Trump Organization still owes £300 million.

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Did Dmitry Rybolovlev’s ties to Donald Trump end with the rescue –deliberate or fortuitous – of the Trump property empire in 2008?

The oligarch has a private Airbus A319 whose registration M-KATE – named after one of his two daughters, Ekaterina – allows it to be tracked online.

M-KATE is normally based in Moscow or Switzerland, but made numerous flights all over the US from August 2016 through November 2016, the peak season for last year’s presidential campaign – right at the moment when American intelligence agencies believe Moscow was supposedly hijacking the election on Trump’s behalf.

According to flight logs from respected plane logging sites FlightRadar24 and PlaneFinder, as well as photos of planes on the ground during the campaign, M-KATE showed up at the very same cities, and the very same (otherwise unremarkable) airports where Trump happened to be – Charlotte, North Carolina, Concord, North Carolina, Las Vegas and Miami.

Indeed, early last month – on Friday, February 10 – M-KATE flew from Switzerland to Miami, where the President was due to party with hedge fund mogul Stephen Schwarzman. Why would Rybolovlev’s plane scurry back and forth from Moscow to odd destinations such as Charlotte and Concord, or to Las Vegas, New York and Miami, precisely when Trump and his team were in the neighbourhood? Was Rybolovlev some sort of Putin emissary, a go-between for Trump and Moscow?

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A White House spokesman denied contact between the two men, adding: ‘No member of the Trump campaign or Mr Trump met with Mr Rybolovlev during the campaign or any other time.’

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