Dominican deal tests Trump pledge of no new foreign projects...
The Trump Organization is returning to a long-dormant licensing deal involving a beachfront luxury resort in the Dominican Republic, testing the limits of Donald Trump's pledge to halt new international Trump-branded projects during his presidency.
The branding deal — signed in 2007 between Trump and a wealthy Dominican family with stakes in airports, education and media — stalled out amid the 2008 financial crisis and a later dispute over Trump's fees. The resort has not used the Trump name in publicity materials or discussed working with Trump in years.
But the Trump family's re-engagement surfaced unexpectedly last week, when Eric Trump, an executive vice president, was photographed touring the property Feb. 2 with brothers Ricardo and Fernando Hazoury, whom Eric Trump had accused of "textbook fraud" in a 2012 lawsuit over allegedly hidden property sales. In a press release, the Hazoury brothers called their relationship with Eric Trump "incredibly strong."
Garten said the deal in the Dominican Republic was never dead even though nothing new has been built or announced in a decade. Garten noted that Trump listed the deal on his 2015 government financial disclosure but said it was not listed on last year's filings because of what he described as a lack of reportable assets associated with the venture.
The effort to grandfather such branding deals demonstrates the flimsiness of Trump's pledge, said Richard Painter, who served as the ethics lawyer for the White House during the George W. Bush administration. "They can take the tiniest little past involvement in something and then extend it into an enormous new deal," Painter said. "There's no way to distinguish between new business and old business."
https://apnews.com/90c95dfef76244e49dcce682960bcd0b/Dominican-deal-tests-Trump's-pledge-of-no-new-foreign-deals