New Yorker: DONALD TRUMPS WORST DEAL aka Donny launderers money for Islamic Terrorists

[Botany]

Thought for the day; The President of the United States of America company has built a hotel
in Azerbaijan to launder money from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and corrupt oil oligarchs.



BTW the hotel never opened and it has no roads to it.

But damn it I want to know about HRC's email server.

*************

DONALD TRUMP’S WORST DEAL
The President helped build a hotel in Azerbaijan that appears to be a corrupt operation engineered by oligarchs tied to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

The building, a five-star hotel and residence called the Trump International Hotel & Tower Baku, has never opened, though from the road it looks ready to welcome the public. Reaching the property is surprisingly difficult; the tower stands amid a welter of on-ramps, off-ramps, and overpasses. During the nine days I was in town, I went to the site half a dozen times, and on each occasion I had a comical exchange with a taxi-driver who had no idea which combination of turns would lead to the building’s entrance.

The more time I spent in the neighborhood, the more I wondered how the hotel could have been imagined as a viable business. The development was conceived, in 2008, as a high-end apartment building. In 2012, after Donald Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, signed multiple contracts with the Azerbaijani developers behind the project, plans were made to transform the tower into an “ultra-luxury property.” According to a Trump Organization press release, a hotel with “expansive guest rooms” would occupy the first thirteen floors; higher stories would feature residences with “spectacular views of the city and Caspian Sea.” For an expensive hotel, the Trump Tower Baku is in an oddly unglamorous location: the underdeveloped eastern end of downtown, which is dominated by train tracks and is miles from the main business district, on the west side of the city. Across the street from the hotel is a discount shopping center; the area is filled with narrow, dingy shops and hookah bars. Other hotels nearby are low-budget options: at the AYF Palace, most rooms are forty-two dollars a night. There are no upscale restaurants or shops. Any guests of the Trump Tower Baku would likely feel marooned.

snip

The Azerbaijanis behind the project were close relatives of Ziya Mammadov, the Transportation Minister and one of the country’s wealthiest and most powerful oligarchs. According to the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index, Azerbaijan is among the most corrupt nations in the world. Its President, Ilham Aliyev, the son of the former President Heydar Aliyev, recently appointed his wife to be Vice-President. Ziya Mammadov became the Transportation Minister in 2002, around the time that the regime began receiving enormous profits from government-owned oil reserves in the Caspian Sea. At the time of the hotel deal, Mammadov, a career government official, had a salary of about twelve thousand dollars, but he was a billionaire.

snip

But the Mammadov family, in addition to its reputation for corruption, has a troubling connection that any proper risk assessment should have unearthed: for years, it has been financially entangled with an Iranian family tied to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the ideologically driven military force. In 2008, the year that the tower was announced, Ziya Mammadov, in his role as Transportation Minister, awarded a series of multimillion-dollar contracts to Azarpassillo, an Iranian construction company. Keyumars Darvishi, its chairman, fought in the Iran-Iraq War. After the war, he became the head of Raman, an Iranian construction firm that is controlled by the Revolutionary Guard. The U.S. government has regularly accused the Guard of criminal activity, including drug trafficking, sponsoring terrorism abroad, and money laundering. Reuters recently reported that the Trump Administration was poised to officially condemn the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/13/donald-trumps-worst-deal

[msanthrope]

1. Grifters! nt

[uponit7771]

2. +1, openly so

[smirkymonkey]

3. K&R

[George II]

4. How could he be stupid enough to think that all these things would not come out eventually?

I was talking about all his shady international deals (not this one) since before the first primary. The biggest one is the half-billion plus that he owes the Bank of China.

[maddiemom]

10. He didn't care and neither do his voters/base.

I doubt that he expected to actually win. It really screwed up his long-term game plan.

[George II]

12. That's true - my early theory about a year ago was that he was in it for the publicity, and...

....when he won, as you say, his long-term plan went awry.

[Vinca]

5. The entire article is worth reading, but I doubt anything will come of it.

There are 2 sets of laws in this country and only the po' folk go to jail. (Although, according to the article, the Dooney of Dooney & Bourke handbag fame went to the big house for dealing with people like this.)

[zentrum]

9. That's what I think too.

Maddow did a whole segment on this and yet, the story seems to have disappeared from the MSM.

[spanone]

6. K&R...

[moondust]

7. FCPA

TrumpCo could be guilty under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Businesses are required to do "extreme vetting" of the people they work with overseas. Judging by the lax-to-nonexistent vetting they've done of the people they've placed in some of the top positions in the U.S. government, it wouldn't be too surprising if they were found to have been equally lax in vetting their partners in Azerbaijan and elsewhere.

[Scarsdale]

8. Birds of a feather

flock together. So. tRump is involved with a corrupt family. Maybe he needs to pick up some tips on how to do even more dirty deals? Is he in Florida again this weekend, at his golden whorehouse? Imagine if a democratic politician acted this way? He (or she) would have been crucified by now, after 5 weeks.

[BobTheSubgenius]

11. I don't understand this deal.

Building a monstrosity like this article describes seems more like a way to set fire to a stack of ill-gotten gains than to legitimize them, which is the object of money-laundering.

Maybe there were kickbacks and sinecures resembling the 'no work' jobs on construction projects with organized crime influence, like we saw on The Sopranos, but, at the end of the day, someone poured between 25 and 50% of a billion dollars into an "asset" with a resultant net worth a fraction of that.

Was someone or some entity a patsy that got fleeced, or was the graft involved worth the torching of millions and millions of dollars? Was someone content to take a pantload of illegal money, pour it into something they knew was a brick and take 15 or 20% of it away with them?