XtremeJibber2001 wrote: ↑Jul 1st, '21, 09:12
boston_e wrote: ↑Jul 1st, '21, 09:01
I guess we are starting to learn why Trump never released his taxes!
I think the truth is Trump Org is used for money laundering. I don't think we'll ever know for sure, but that's my $.02.
13 people with known or alleged links to the Russian Mafia held the deeds to, lived in or ran criminal operations out of Trump Tower in New York or other Trump properties. I mean that many of them used Trump-branded real estate to launder vast amounts of money by buying multimillion-dollar condos through anonymous shell companies. I mean that the Bayrock Group, a real estate development company that was based in Trump Tower and had ties to the Kremlin, came up with a new business model to franchise Trump condos after he lost billions of dollars in his Atlantic City casino developments, and helped make him rich again. Yet Trump’s relationship with the Russian underworld [...] has barely surfaced in the uproar surrounding Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign.
Let’s go back to 1984, when David Bogatin, an alleged Russian gangster who arrived in the United States a few years earlier with $3 in his pocket, sat down with Trump and bought not one but five condos, for a total of $6 million — about $15 million in today’s dollars. What was most striking about the transaction was that at the time, according to David Cay Johnston’s “The Making of Donald Trump,” Trump Tower was one of only two major buildings in New York City that sold condos to buyers who used shell companies that allowed them to purchase real estate while concealing their identities. Thus, according to the New York state attorney general’s office, when Trump closed the deal with Bogatin, whether he knew it or not, he had just helped launder money for the Russian Mafia.
Over the next three decades, dozens of lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, mortgage brokers and other white-collar professionals came together to facilitate such transactions on a massive scale. According to a BuzzFeed investigation, more than 1,300 condos, one-fifth of all Trump-branded condos sold in the United States since the 1980s, were shifted “in secretive, all-cash transactions that enable buyers to avoid legal scrutiny by shielding their finances and identities.”
The Trump Organization has dismissed money laundering charges as unsubstantiated, and because it is so difficult to penetrate the shell companies that purchased these condos, it is almost impossible for reporters — or, for that matter, anyone without subpoena power — to determine how much money laundering by Russians went through Trump-branded properties. Anders Aslund, a Swedish economist, said “Early on, Trump came to the conclusion that it is better to do business with crooks than with honest people. Crooks have two big advantages. First, they’re prepared to pay more money than honest people. And second, they will always lose if you sue them because they are known to be crooks.”
The condo sales were just a part of it. In 2002, after Trump had racked up $4 billion in debt from his ventures in Atlantic City, the Russians again came to his rescue, by way of the Bayrock Group. At a time when Trump found it almost impossible to get loans from Western banks, Bayrock offered him enormous fees — 18 to 25 percent of the profits — simply to use his name on its developments.
So how did all this go unchallenged? According to Jonathan Winer, who served as deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement in the Clinton administration, one answer may be lax regulations. “If you are doing a transaction with no mortgage, there is no financial institution that needs to know where the money came from, particularly if it’s a wire transfer from overseas,” Winer told me in an interview for my book. “The customer obligations that are imposed on all kinds of financial institutions are not imposed on people selling real estate. They should have been, but they weren’t.”
