Kushner worked with the Saudis to blockade Qatar...then the Qataris offered him billions of dollars and the blockade went away. Kushner is using his position to personally enrich himself and can now be blackmailed by every country in the Middle East
The Kushners Are Finally Getting That Sweet, Sweet Qatari Cash
Qatar, under siege, opens its pocketbook to help save 666 Fifth.
BESS LEVIN
MAY 17, 2018 4:27 PM
Last month, in an effort to push back on the growing consensus that his eldest son may be an idiot, Charlie Kushner sat down with CNN to claim that the decision to buy 666 Fifth Avenue, a Midtown tower that has become an albatross around Kushner Cos.’s neck, was not Jared’s but his. “I pushed Jared to do the deal,” Charlie insisted, despite the fact that Jared had been the de facto C.E.O. at the time the deal was being negotiated. His father, in fact, was busy making wallets at a prison camp in Alabama, where he was serving time for, among other things, setting up his brother-in-law with a prostitute, taping the encounter, and sending it to his sister in retaliation for turning state’s evidence. But we digress. Regardless of whose idea it was to buy 666 Fifth—what was then the most expensive building in New York City history, on the eve of the financial crisis—, the deal was a disaster. The building’s biggest tenants fled during the recession. The Kushners had to refinance, selling a 49.5 percent stake in the building to Vornado Realty Trust in exchange for a portion of the debt. Still, the mortgage ballooned. The entire $1.2 billion balance is due in 2019, and the property is bleeding money.
The result has been a slow-motion, failed fire sale, with the Kushners trying to find someone, anyone, to bail them out. In 2017, it looked like Anbang Insurance Group, a Chinese holding company with ties to the Chinese government, might bite, but they backed out when the heat on Jared—suddenly a West Wing adviser—got too hot. Charlie even sat down with Qatar’s finance minister, Ali Sharif Al Emadi, in 2017, but the talks allegedly went nowhere.
Why did those talks go nowhere? As Charlie Kushner told CNN, Kushner Cos. takes pains to avoid even the perception of a conflict of interest. Indeed, the firm’s lawyer “reminds dealmakers weekly of the company’s self-imposed ban on financing from foreign governments.” Kushner the Elder even went so far to admit it was “stupid” of him to meet with Al Emadi in 2017, saying he accepted the invite purely “out of respect” for the Qataris to tell them there was no way “we could do business.”
Getting a bail out from a company with “extensive ties” to Qatar, though? Apparently that’s a-O.K.!
Charles Kushner . . . is in advanced talks with Brookfield Properties over a partnership to take control of the 41-story aluminum-clad tower 666 Fifth Avenue in Midtown, according to two real-estate executives who have been briefed on the pending deal but are not authorized to discuss it. Brookfield is a publicly traded company, headquartered in Canada, one of whose major investors is the Qatar Investment Authority.
Brookfield has extensive ties to Qatar. The Qatar Investment Authority is the second-largest shareholder in Brookfield Properties, ranking only behind Brookfield’s former parent company. And the Qatar fund and Brookfield have teamed up on several real-estate deals in the United States and elsewhere in recent years, including Brookfield’s retail and apartment complex, Manhattan West, now under construction on the West Side. Brookfield and Qatar also control the Canary Wharf office complex in London.
If the deal pans out, according to the Times, Kushner Cos. will use the cash to buy out Vornado, whose C.E.O., Steve Roth, previously said that 666 Fifth “ would be worth a lot more if it was just dirt.” While Vornado would continue to own the building’s retail space, Kushner Cos. would pay it $120 million to settle the $80 million high-interest loan that Vornado provided graciously provided six years ago for the office building. A QIA spokesman told The Hive “QIA has no involvement whatsoever in this deal.”
Qatar’s newfound beneficence toward the Kushner family is especially curious given the long-standing speculation about Jared’s personal alliances with Mohammed bin Salman and Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown princes of Saudi Arabia and the Abu Dhabi, respectively. Some political observers’ eyebrows were raised when, just a few weeks after Charlie’s talks with the Qataris fell apart, his son endorsed a Saudi- and U.A.E.-led blockade of Qatar. One wonders if the Trump administration will continue to support the blockade, or whether it will suddenly have a change of heart now that the Qatar Investment Authority, via Brookfield, has opened its wallet.
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