Washington
The branding deal — signed in 2007 between Trump and the wealthy Hazoury 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 with brothers Ricardo and Fernando Hazoury. He had accused them of “textbook fraud” in a 2012 lawsuit over allegedly hidden property sales.
In a news release, the Hazoury brothers now call their relationship with the president’s son “incredibly strong.”
The Trump Organization’s general counsel, Alan Garten, describes efforts to restart the development branding deal as very preliminary. The renewed pursuit of the project shows that the company believes it has latitude to carry on significant new activity overseas, despite the president’s pledge to avoid new foreign development deals.
“No new foreign deals will be made whatsoever during the duration of President Trump’s presidency,” Trump lawyer Sheri Dillon of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLC said last month at a news conference. Under the self-imposed rules she described, new domestic deals will be allowed, but they will go through what she described as a vigorous vetting process.
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.”
The deal with the Hazourys contemplated multiple stages of Trump-themed projects at Cap Cana, a master-planned resort town minutes from the busy Punta Cana International Airport. The project is twice the size of Manhattan, and Trump’s part began with the sale of 68 multimillion-dollar home sites known as “The Trump Farallons.” Trump-branded hotel, condominium and golf course projects were supposed to follow. At a lavish party in Cap Cana in 2007, Trump “congratulated fortunate buyers on their investment,” according to a news release by Cap Cana.
Trump’s deal never progressed beyond the initial sale of Trump-branded vacant lots.