The Oligarch Files
..... Deutsche Bank, one of the few international banks that would do business with him.
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,.....
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Rybolovlev was agreeing to pay Trump $95 million (£48 million) for the house in June 2008, according to US property records.
This was viewed as a surprisingly high price in a crashing market and the most that had ever been paid for a single house in America .............
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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.
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| PUTIN’S BANKERS
........According to experts, the Bank of Cyprus has been up to its ears in Russian ‘flight’ capital – money transferred abroad to avoid taxes, inflation or maybe seizure by the state.
While the bank’s identity records, even for large shareholders, are murky, Rybolovlev appears to have retained up to a 3.3 per cent stake, even after the 2013 crash when the island’s entire financial sector failed (and had to be bailed out by the European Central Bank and the IMF).
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.
Ross was also a generous donor to Trump’s 2016 campaign.
None of this suggests any wrongdoing whatsoever by Mr Trump –but it makes the point that his links with Russian money are numerous and part of a chain, or series of chains, that go back ultimately to the Russian establishment. And the world of Russian finance is not without its problems.
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.
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MYSTERY FLIGHTS TO DULLSVILLE
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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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