Article from June 2018: Russians bought 86 Trump properties -- all in cash -- totaling $109 million

[CousinIT]

https://www.metro.us/president-trump/russians-bought-86-trump-properties#.Xfa3avB3-Ch.twitter

People connected to Russia or former Soviet republics have paid cash for 86 Trump-branded properties, a total of $109 million, with many of them using shell companies, McClatchy has reported.

President Trump once described those deals more modestly. "I have had dealings over the years where I sold a house to a very wealthy Russian many years ago. I had the Miss Universe pageant — which I owned for quite a while — I had it in Moscow a long time ago. But other than that, I have nothing to do with Russia," he said in an interview with NBC's Lester Holt in November 2017.

Accepting cash for real estate is legal, but the practice — along with buying under a shell company, obscuring the identity of the buyer — raises red flags at the Treasury Department for potential money laundering. Special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign has reportedly broadened to whether Trump's real-estate businesses helped Russians launder money.

[dchill]

1. Iceberg, meet tip.

[democratisphere]

2. Endless corruption supported by the entire rethuglicon party.

Damn it is sickening!

[leanforward]

3. For me,back to politics, Yes money laundering

This is the first time I've seen a number like this. It confirms what I've thought for a long time, the paruskies have money in him plus kompromat.

I trust McLatchy. Eight-six for $109 million. And there is probably more.

[Hoyt]

4. That's a lot of transactions with Ruskies, although doesn't seem a lot for 86 properties.

Hope this is confirmed and investigated.

[Nay]

9. That's the first thing I noticed -- doesn't seem like much money for all those properties.

Soooo, what else is going on?

[GusBob]

12. Good clean money

as in money laundering

your clue is " shell companies"

[moondust]

5. $60 million of that in one deal?

~
...the 2008 sale, which came months after Trump Entertainment Resorts filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and while the then–real estate mogul was struggling to find banks willing to lend to him.
~
TRUMP SOLD A $40 MILLION ESTATE TO A RUSSIAN OLIGARCH FOR $100 MILLION—AND A DEMOCRATIC SENATOR WANTS TO KNOW WHY

Sounds like a Pooty bailout.

Sen. Ron Wyden requested records on this sale but I haven't found anything to indicate he ever got them.

[Kid Berwyn]

6. A regular Russian Laundromat, Craig Unger called it.

He lifted up the lid...



Trump’s Russian Laundromat

How to use Trump Tower and other luxury high-rises to clean dirty money, run an international crime syndicate, and propel a failed real estate developer into the White House.

By CRAIG UNGER
The New Republic, July , 2017

Excerpt...

Trump made his first trip to Russia in 1987, only a few years before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Invited by Soviet Ambassador Yuri Dubinin, Trump was flown to Moscow and Leningrad—all expenses paid—to talk business with high-ups in the Soviet command. In The Art of the Deal, Trump recounted the lunch meeting with Dubinin that led to the trip. “One thing led to another,” he wrote, “and now I’m talking about building a large luxury hotel, across the street from the Kremlin, in partnership with the Soviet government.”

Over the years, Trump and his sons would try and fail five times to build a new Trump Tower in Moscow. But for Trump, what mattered most were the lucrative connections he had begun to make with the Kremlin—and with the wealthy Russians who would buy so many of his properties in the years to come. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets,” Donald Trump Jr. boasted at a real estate conference in 2008. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

The money, illicit and otherwise, began to rain in earnest after the Soviet Union fell in 1991. President Boris Yeltsin’s shift to a market economy was so abrupt that cash-rich gangsters and corrupt government officials were able to privatize and loot state-held assets in oil, coal, minerals, and banking. Yeltsin himself, in fact, would later describe Russia as “the biggest mafia state in the world.” After Vladimir Putin succeeded Yeltsin as president, Russian intelligence effectively joined forces with the country’s mobsters and oligarchs, allowing them to operate freely as long as they strengthen Putin’s power and serve his personal financial interests. According to James Henry, a former chief economist at McKinsey & Company who consulted on the Panama Papers, some $1.3 trillion in illicit capital has poured out of Russia since the 1990s.

At the top of the sprawling criminal enterprise was Semion Mogilevich. Beginning in the early 1980s, according to the FBI, the short, squat Ukrainian was the key money-laundering contact for the Solntsevskaya Bratva, or Brotherhood, one of the richest criminal syndicates in the world. Before long, he was running a multibillion-dollar worldwide racket of his own. Mogilevich wasn’t feared because he was the most violent gangster, but because he was reputedly the smartest. The FBI has credited the “brainy don,” who holds a degree in economics from Lviv University, with a staggering range of crimes. He ran drug trafficking and prostitution rings on an international scale; in one characteristic deal, he bought a bankrupt airline to ship heroin from Southeast Asia into Europe. He used a jewelry business in Moscow and Budapest as a front for art that Russian gangsters stole from museums, churches, and synagogues all over Europe. He has also been accused of selling some $20 million in stolen weapons, including ground-to-air missiles and armored troop carriers, to Iran. “He uses this wealth and power to not only further his criminal enterprises,” the FBI says, “but to influence governments and their economies.”

In Russia, Mogilevich’s influence reportedly reaches all the way to the top. In 2005, Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian intelligence agent who defected to London, recorded an interview with investigators detailing his inside knowledge of the Kremlin’s ties to organized crime. “Mogilevich,” he said in broken English, “have good relationship with Putin since 1994 or 1993.” A year later Litvinenko was dead, apparently poisoned by agents of the Kremlin.

Continues...

https://newrepublic.com/article/143586/trumps-russian-laundromat-trump-tower-luxury-high-rises-dirty-money-international-crime-syndicate

[safeinOhio]

7. Most likely not enough to

cover his debt payments.

[Hortensis]

8. After Trump's income through the American/Italian Mafia

tanked when the crimebusters brought them down in the 1980s, he switched to Central Asian organized crime groups, which tended to all be tied to Putin and the Russian Mafia.

From what I'm reading, a standard tactic of Putin's has been to "rescue" major crime figures in other nations who get in trouble with the law, with the understanding that they ally with him in return. As mostly a money launderer, severely incompetent and small and poor compared to the new oligarchs, Trump was hardly a "major," just a tool, but he was and is an organized crime figure.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

11. and a bargain ...

Putin had to have noticed, or assisted, the RW propaganda machine while coming to the "rescue" of Trump. The U.S. set itself up by allowing media conglomeration which allowed for fewer points of control of news reporting.

[Hortensis]

13. Oh, absolutely. Russia's modus was mostly to amplify

and multiply Republican and Sanders' faction attacks on the Democrats. So much usefully malicious and dishonest material generated here, they only occasionally invented their own.

During the primary Sanders modeled many of his themes on Republican themes, slightly "kinder and gentler" versions of crooked Hillary, corrupt Democrats (but only all us "establishment" chickens who aren't with him), etc., so that he was able to benefit tremendously from Republican/RW U.S. and Russian media manipulations. The anti-Democratic messages were an effectively if unofficially coordinated blizzard coming from both sides and Russia.

Gosh, you're so right that there were fewer points of control of news reporting, and our proudly free and open journalism was open gates to the fortress, but also conservatives had already long before purchased, created, infiltrated and otherwise obtained a great deal of control of much of the MSM from inside. DUers in 2015-16 were practically addicted to MSNBC and CNN, even after some like me slowly became aware that both networks, not just Fox, were working with the Republicans and Russia, and Sanders during the primary, to defeat Hillary.

And of course the LW or Russia-serving media who weren't part of the blizzard from the right were creating the one from Sanders' side. And just like the FBI, all candidates and media were fully aware as they worked to defeat Democrats that Russia was working with them to the same end.

What a mess. If only we could start the clean-up by sweeping out of office and influence all these dirty people. Repub-Russia's efforts to corrupt us have embedded their agents, assets, and useful idiots everywhere.

[BSdetect]

10. Crimes hidden in open sight. To repugnants.