Trump Jr. Pushed Blatantly Illegal Project In India

[sunonmars]

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-inc-podcast-donald-trump-jr-india-project

Link to tweet

Last month, Donald Trump Jr. visited India to tout new Trump properties. Full page ads in India’s top papers announced, “Trump has arrived. Have you?”

It wasn’t Trump Jr.’s first trip to India. “I’ve been coming to India for over a decade,” he said during his visit last month. “There’s an entrepreneurial spirit here … it needs no further explanation.”

This week on “Trump, Inc.,” we’re looking at the Trumps’ yearslong work in India, where corruption in the real estate industry is endemic.

We worked with Investigative Fund reporter Anjali Kamat, whose reporting on the Trumps’ business in India appears in the new issue of The New Republic.

As with many of the company’s deals abroad, the Trump Organization’s India projects are all licensing deals. Trump Jr. has been closely involved in much of the work.

Listen to the Episode

The Trumps’ first India project, in Mumbai, was halted in early 2012 after investigators found significant “irregularities.” The investigators had been tipped off by a state lawmaker who suspected a $100 million fraud scheme and warned of “gross violations” in the project’s plans. Authorities revoked the building’s permits.

A few months later, in April 2012, Trump Jr. traveled to Mumbai and, along with partners, met with a top official there to try to get the project restarted.

Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan, the equivalent of a U.S. governor, had been told Trump Jr. wanted to discuss investing in the state. But instead, Chavan recalled, Trump Jr. and his partners asked Chavan to overturn the decision to revoke the permits.

Chavan declined. “I would get into trouble to sanction something that was blatantly illegal,” he told us. The plans were “not within the existing rules.” (Chavan has also described the encounter to The New York Times and Washington Post.)

The Trumps were back in India in 2014, after a new government came into power, Narendra Modi’s BJP. The Trump Tower Mumbai — a gold-hued skyscraper that the Trump Organization bills as “unlike anything you have ever seen”—is now slated to finished next year. It is one of five Trump-affiliated projects currently under development in India.

The Trump Organization said the projects are doing well. One Trump partner said they booked $15 million in sales on just one day during Trump Jr.’s visit. It was the last day buyers would qualify for an offer by the Trump Organization’s partners to dine with the president’s son.

Only a handful of names of buyers in the Trump projects have been disclosed.

Read the Twitter thread, stunning....

[mchill]

1. Back in the 1990's

When my good friend trying to get permits to build in Bodhgaya, Bihar, it was all about payoffs and bribes to officials.

[procon]

2. Like father, like son. Why would anyone expect that Trump's offspring

-- any of them! -- would be any less venal than he is? They're going to be worse because their warped idea of what's "normal" is the myriad examples of the immoral, unethical, deceitful and unscrupulous behaviors of their father.

[matt819]

3. त्याला कुलूप लावा

त्याला कुलूप लावा

Tyālā kulūpa lāvā

According to Google Translate, that's Lock Him Up, in Marathi.

[dameatball]

4. It is going to be very interesting to look back on this trainwreck of a Presidency,

Not just in terms of damage to our country. I can only imagine what the Trump and Kushner organizations are going to look like when it is over. Talk about houses of cards. Whatever reputations they may have had worldwide will be in tatters.

[forgotmylogin]

5. "In other news...water is wet..."

[dixiegrrrrl]

6. that latest India trip is where he said even the beggars were happy, always smiling.

( you've got the nicest poverty over here&quot was his point
but then
someone from India pointed out that people in public there never walked around smiling in public, it was not a cultural habit.