Stink of corruption: Trump tower tied to gangsters

[RandomGuy]

A Panama tower carries Trump’s name and ties to organized crime


PANAMA CITY — When Ivanka Trump flew here in 2006 to push her family’s latest business project — an oceanfront steel and glass tower called the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower, shaped like a sail and designed to be one of the tallest buildings in Latin America — a Brazilian real estate salesman named Alexandre Ventura Nogueira says he was ready with a sales pitch.

Ventura, who said he only had a small real estate company at the time, said he told Ivanka Trump that he could sell condos in the proposed skyscraper for three times the price of similar units in Panama City. The reason: the Trump name, which would go on the building in a licensing deal even though the Trump Organization was not the building’s real developer.

Ventura says he and Ivanka agreed to a kind of challenge. If Ventura could sell apartments as easily as he claimed, and for those high prices, he’d become the main sales representative for the project.

"The agreement was, I had a week to sell 100 units," Ventura said in a recent interview with NBC News. "I said, 'I'm going to do better, I’m going to sell without telling (the buyers) the price."

Ventura did sell the initial units, and later hundreds more. He is now a fugitive. In May 2009, Ventura was arrested in Panama for real estate fraud, unrelated to the Trump project. Mauricio Ceballos, a former financial crimes prosecutor in Panama who investigated Ventura, said that dozens of complaints against Ventura crossed his desk accusing him of double- and triple-selling apartments, both at the Trump Ocean Club and other developments.

Ventura eventually fled Panama while out on bail. He denied having defrauded his clients but admitted to NBC News that he has participated in money laundering on behalf of corrupt Panamanian politicians, unrelated to the building project.

Ventura isn’t the only person associated with the building who has had run-ins with the law. An NBC News investigation into the Trump Ocean Club, in conjunction with Reuters, shows that the project was riddled with brokers, customers and investors who have been linked to drug trafficking and international crime. Ceballos, who investigated the project, went as far as to call the skyscraper “a vehicle for money laundering.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/panama-tower-carries-trump-s-name-ties-organized-crime-n821706

[boutons_deux]

Is Ivanka Trump a Target of Investigation Now? It Seems Inevitable

Ivanka is deeply implicated in her family’s involvement with foreign corruption.

in all the merriment about Ivanka's questionable taste and the juxtaposition between the tax cuts for the wealthy she's helping to sell and the lives of all those blue-collar workers her father supposedly represented with his "populist" campaign, few people have stopped to ask how it can possibly be that a top adviser to the president still owns a "lifestyle" company in the first place.

We have become so inured to the outright corruption of this White House that we simply accept the fact that all the Trumps and Kushners have merged their business interests with their jobs working for the president.

It's not just the first family either. The NRCC is just coming right out and putting money directly into Donald Trump's pocket now:

In case you were wondering, the Trump Hotel is doing very, very well what with lobbyists and foreign dignitaries (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-hotel-dc-profits_us_598db0f1e4b09096429653c4) spending huge wads of cash there over the past year. Imagine that.

it turns out that her brand, like her father's, is more hype than substance. Ivanka is beautiful and her style is admired by many.

But her business history is nothing to be proud of.

Recent investigations into the Trump real estate empire show that she had been involved in the company's most suspicious dealings with shady oligarchs and mobbed-up money launderers.

If Donald Trump is in the crosshairs of federal investigators for nefarious financial transactions with disreputable characters, his daughter will likely be caught in that same net.

the Trump Ocean Club, which Donald Trump dubbed Ivanka's "baby."

Another notorious Ivanka project was the 2014 Trump Tower Baku in Azerbaijan, which she personally oversaw.

This was the project that, according to a recent New Yorker report, (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/13/donald-trumps-worst-deal) was partially funded by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and served as a cash laundromat for the country's government.

This was no hands-off arrangement. Ivanka and the company were heavily involved in all the details, from the interior paneling to the landscaping.

According to experts, this was unusual for this sort of deal and indicates a level of personal attention that exposed the Trump Organization to serious legal trouble.

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act requires that American companies not make profits from illegal activities overseas, and simply saying you didn't know where the money was coming from isn't good enough.

It's very difficult to believe that the Trumps didn't know that they were involved in these massive corruption schemes.

The evidence was right in front of their eyes.

Now that evidence is right in front of an investigative team that has a mandate to go wherever the evidence takes them,

Ivanka Trump is as legally vulnerable as her husband and the rest of her family.

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/ivanka-trump-target-investigation-now-it-seems-inevitable