For more than 30 years, Mr. Trump has repeatedly sought to conduct business in Russia. He traveled to Moscow in 1987 to explore building a hotel. He applied for his trademark in the country as early as 1996. And his children and associates have met with Russian developers and government officials on multiple occasions in search of joint ventures.
.. But the company says nothing has come of it.
There Was a Moscow Hotel Deal in the Works During the Campaign
.. Perhaps the closest Mr. Trump came to launching a real estate project in Russia was during the presidential campaign, when he signed a letter of intent in late 2015 for a Trump hotel to be built in Moscow. Ultimately, the deal never materialized.
In email exchanges with Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, Felix Sater, a Russian émigré who had previously helped develop Trump SoHo in New York, talked about securing financing for the Moscow project from VTB, a major state-owned Russian bank under American sanctions. He also mused about how the deal, if supported by Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, would “fix relations between the countries by showing everyone that commerce & business are much better and more practical than politics.”
“I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected,” Mr. Sater wrote in one of the emails.
.. Mr. Trump signed the letter of intent with Andrey Rozov, a developer of retail and residential projects in the Moscow region. If the deal went through, Mr. Trump would receive a $4 million upfront fee in exchange for licensing his name, and his company would manage the completed hotel.
.. By January 2016, the project seemed to have stalled. At one point, without success, Mr. Cohen emailed an aide to Mr. Putin seeking help jump-starting it.
.. Mr. Trump’s business opportunities in Russia got little traction until he took the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow in 2013.
.. The visit left an impression on Mr. Trump and had him contemplating future endeavors with the Agalarovs.
.. “I had a great weekend with you and your family,” Mr. Trump posted on Twitter in a message to Aras Agalarov. “You have done a FANTASTIC job. TRUMP TOWER-MOSCOW is next,” he wrote, before referring to Mr. Agalarov’s son, a pop star: “EMIN was WOW!”
In June 2016, a publicist for Emin Agalarov requested that Donald Trump Jr. meet with a Kremlin-connected lawyer. That meeting, at Trump Tower in New York, first reported by The New York Times last July, included other campaign officials and has been the subject of considerable scrutiny.
.. in a September 2015 interview on “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” he had made the Miss Universe pageant seem far more important.
“I called it my weekend in Moscow,” Mr. Trump said. “I was with the top-level people, both oligarchs and generals, and top-of-the-government people. I can’t go further than that, but I will tell you that I met the top people, and the relationship was extraordinary.”
.. Deutsche Bank, offered Mr. Trump more than $4 billion in loan commitments and potential bond offerings, a majority of which were completed, The Times reported last year.
.. the bank last year landed in legal trouble over Russian money laundering — paying more than $600 million in penalties to American and British regulators.
.. Some Deutsche Bank executives expect they will eventually have to produce records as part of Mr. Mueller’s inquiry
.. The bank has already been asked to turn over documents to federal prosecutors in Brooklyn about another client with a White House connection: the Kushner Companies
.. Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian billionaire oligarch, paid $95 million for Mr. Trump’s oceanfront mansion in Palm Beach, Fla
.. Mr. Trump sold the house less than four years after buying it for about $41 million. Mr. Rybolovlev paid the markup despite buying the property in 2008, at the height of the housing crisis. And Mr. Trump had made few improvements to the mansion, which reportedly had a mold problem.
.. Mr. Rybolovlev, moreover, never lived in the property.
.. At the time of the sale, Mr. Trump was facing financial pressure. He potentially owed Deutsche Bank $40 million after not paying off a loan for his Chicago hotel and tower.
.. James Dodson recounted a conversation he had had with Eric Trump in 2013 on a newly opened Trump golf course in Charlotte, N.C. Mr. Dodson said he had asked Mr. Trump about the company’s sources of funds, and Mr. Trump told him, “We have pretty much all the money we need from investors in Russia.”
.. In 2008, at a real estate conference in New York, Donald Trump Jr. said: “In terms of high-end product influx into the U.S., Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets, say in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo and anywhere in New York. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
In Moscow Luxury-Tower Plan, Donald Trump Paired With Developer for Russia’s Working Class
Andrei Rozov .. He and Trump associate Felix Sater both worked for a Russian property tycoon named Sergei Polonsky.
.. In 2015, Mr. Sater brought to the president’s company a proposal to license the Trump brand for a residential project in the Russian capital
.. Mr. Rozov signed a nonbinding letter of intent with the Trump Organization in October 2015 on behalf of his firm to explore the possibility of a Trump-branded tower in Moscow.
.. Mr. Sater, in a statement, confirmed proposing construction of “the tallest building in Moscow” to the Trump Organization.
.. Mr. Cohen, in a statement provided to congressional investigators, said he “primarily communicated” with the Moscow-based development firm on the idea through Mr. Sater.
.. The Moscow proposal came at the end of a period during which Mr. Trump, his children and other Trump Organization executives initiated numerous deals with foreign developers, two of them in the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Azerbaijan.
.. As Mr. Trump prepared to take over as president, his company ended several of its most controversial foreign deals, including the Azerbaijan and Georgia projects, but it kept others in the pipeline.
Mr. Trump said his company, which would be run by his sons and another executive, wouldn’t forge new deals outside the U.S. He didn’t relinquish ownership.
.. The Moscow project ultimately faltered for what the Trump Organization described as business reasons, but only after the company lawyer, Mr. Cohen, discussed the matter multiple times with Mr. Trump and sent an email directly to the Kremlin public-relations department in early 2016 asking for help on the deal.
Mr. Cohen’s outreach to the Kremlin spotlighted the kinds of politically-tinged real-estate deals the Trump Organization continued to pursue and consider in far-flung locales, even as Mr. Trump campaigned for the presidency.
.. Mr. Sater also made inroads in Russia with the property tycoon Mr. Polonsky.
Donald Trump’s business links to the mob – BBC Newsnight
Donald Trump now looks like the front-runner to be the Republican candidate for the US presidency. One of his big appeals is his business success – and his claim that his wealth means he can’t be bought and sold. But there’s evidence which not only casts doubt on Trump’s wealth claims – but also reveals his history of business relationships with figures connected to organised crime. John Sweeney reports.
Trump Attorney Says He Discussed Moscow Tower Deal With Trump During Campaign
In an interview, Michael Cohen says he talked with the then-candidate about the licensing deal on three occasions
.. Michael Cohen, an attorney for the Trump Organization, discussed a prospective real-estate deal in Moscow with Donald Trump on three occasions during the presidential campaign, Mr. Cohen said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.In 2015, Mr. Cohen said, he informed the then-candidate that he was working on a licensing deal for a Trump Tower in Moscow. He subsequently asked for and received Mr. Trump’s signature on a nonbinding letter of intent for the project in October 2015. And in January 2016, he said
.. Mr. Cohen’s communication with the president about the Moscow project may come under scrutiny because of a January 2016 email Mr. Cohen sent to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s top press official to ask for “assistance” in arranging the deal.
.. In the email to Mr. Peskov, Mr. Cohen said communication between the Trump Organization and a Russia-based company that was the prospective developer of the tower had “stalled” and said, “As this project is too important, I am hereby requesting your assistance. I respectfully request someone, preferably you, contact me so that I might discuss the specifics as well as arranging meetings with the appropriate individuals.”.. Mr. Trump’s awareness of his company’s efforts to procure a business deal in Moscow, as described by Mr. Cohen, came during the campaign when he often praised Mr. Putin... Mr. Trump repeatedly denied any business ties to Russia, saying at a news conference in July 2016, “I have nothing to do with Russia.”.. Mr. Cohen in a statement issued earlier Monday said he rejected the proposal “because I lost confidence that the prospective licensee would be able to obtain the real estate, financing, and government approvals necessary to bring the proposal to fruition.”.. Felix Sater, whom Mr. Trump hired in 2010 as an unpaid consultant for the Trump Organization, wrote in a November 2015 email to Mr. Cohen that he planned to enlist the help of Mr. Putin.“Our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it,” he wrote. “I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”
.. Mr. Cohen also said Mr. Sater “constantly asked me to travel to Moscow” to move the proposal forward, and also asked him to have Mr. Trump travel to Russia. Mr. Cohen said he told Mr. Sater Mr. Trump “would not travel to Russia unless there was a definitive agreement in place.”