Trump Aides Deal With Chinese Firm Raises Fear of Tangled Interests
WASHINGTON — A secretive Chinese company with deep ties to the country’s Communist Party has become one of the biggest foreign investors in the United States over the past year, snapping up American firms in a string of multibillion-dollar deals. But it is one of its smaller deals that is apparently stalling the White House career of a top adviser to President Trump.
Anthony Scaramucci, a flamboyant former campaign fund-raiser for Mr. Trump whom the president has appointed as the White House liaison to the business community, has been in limbo for more than a week since he agreed to sell his investment firm to a subsidiary of the Chinese conglomerate, HNA Group.
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Mr. Scaramucci is on the job but has yet to be sworn in, partly because of concerns about the Jan. 17 deal, according to two administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to publicly discuss personnel matters.
It is the second known transaction between a politically connected Chinese company and an incoming White House official. And it is evidence of the unusual confluence of interests between superrich members of the new Trump administration who need to unwind complex financial portfolios to comply with government rules and international firms eager to buy American assets.
“You are not going to get an administration with thousands of political appointees and not have people who have contacts with the Chinese,” said Derek Scissors, a China specialist at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning research organization in Washington.
Still, he said, no one should have any illusions about the Chinese motivation behind such deals. “HNA is looking for influence in an administration that looks like it is positioning itself to be anti-China,” he said. “They all are.”
Previous administrations have rarely faced such issues, partly because the surge of Chinese investment in the United States is relatively recent. Chinese companies are on a buying spree, investing about $50 billion in American companies and projects last year alone. HNA Group, a conglomerate focused heavily on aviation, burst onto the American business scene last year when it bought a quarter of the hotelier Hilton Worldwide Holdings for $6.5 billion, and paid $6 billion for the information technology giant Ingram Micro.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-aide’s-deal-with-chinese-firm-raises-fear-of-tangled-interests/ar-AAmtNdn?li=BBnb7Kz