Washington
Leonid Zeldovich, who reportedly has done extensive business in the Russian-annexed area of Crimea, bought four Trump units outright at a cost of more than $4.35 million, three of them in New York City between 2007 and 2010.
And Igor Romashov, who served as chairman of the board of Transoil, a Russian oil transport company subject to U.S. sanctions, paid $620,000 upfront for a unit at a building adorned with the future U.S. president’s name in Sunny Isles Beach in 2010.
Buyers connected to Russia or former Soviet republics made 86 all-cash sales — totaling nearly $109 million — at 10 Trump-branded properties in South Florida and New York City, according to a new analysis shared with McClatchy. Many of them made purchases using shell companies designed to obscure their identities.
“The size and scope of these cash purchases are deeply troubling as they can often signal money laundering activity,” said Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and a former federal prosecutor. “There have long been credible allegations of money laundering by the Trump Organization which, if true, would pose a real threat to the United States in the event that Russia were able to leverage evidence of illicit financial transactions against the president.”
There’s nothing illegal about accepting cash for real estate. But transactions that do not involve mortgages — which account for one in four residential purchases in the country — raise red flags for law enforcement officials as it could be a way to commit fraud or launder money.
In 2016, the Treasury Department targeted Miami and New York — where cash purchases account for half of residential sales — for increased scrutiny, requiring title insurers to report the names behind the shell companies buying homes with cash. It was later expanded to include a handful of other localities, including Broward County, Fla., which includes Fort Lauderdale and its wealthy suburbs.
Special counsel Robert Mueller has spent more than a year investigating whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, a widening probe that appears to include questions about his family business, the Trump Organization. “This is all about money laundering,” former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is quoted as saying about the Mueller inquiry in the book “Fire and Fury.”
Glenn Simpson, co-founder of Fusion GPS, the firm behind a dossier alleging ties between Trump and Russians, told the House Intelligence Committee in November that his group uncovered “patterns of buying and selling that we thought were suggestive of money laundering” at Trump-branded properties around the globe. “Generally speaking, the patterns of activity that we thought might be suggestive of money laundering were … fast-turnover deals, and deals where there seemed to have been efforts to disguise the identity of the buyer,” he said.
The Trump Organization, the collective name for about 500 Trump businesses owned by the president and now run by his adult sons, did not respond to a request for comment about the data, which was compiled by the left-leaning group American Bridge 21st Century and focused on areas that the Treasury Department targeted. But company officials have previously told McClatchy that the company generally focuses on branding and management and is not involved with sales or development.
Gil Dezer, who operates six buildings that bear Trump’s name on Sunny Isles Beach, which is nicknamed “Little Moscow,” acknowledged that Russian buyers are attracted to the Trump name.
“They have been buying in Miami for over 20 years and love branded everything, from their Versace clothing to the Rolls Royces they buy,” he said in a statement. “They buy branded quality goods and that’s why they bought homes at Trump.”
But he said virtually all real estate purchases between 2008 and 2013 were cash because the recession made mortgages largely unavailable. “If it wasn’t for our wealthy buyer group we would have made no sales,” he said.
The all-cash buyers include Alexey Ustaev, founder of a private bank based in St. Petersburg, Russia; Igor Zorin, a government official who runs a state-owned broadcasting company; the wife of hockey player Viacheslav Fetisov; pop star Igor Nikolaev; Roman Sinyavsky, a luxury real estate broker who was one of the first to sell units at Trump’s South Florida building; and Evgeny Bachurin, who was fired as head of Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency by Russian President Vladimir Putin before becoming a donor to a political action committee supporting Trump, according to American Bridge.
Other news reports have looked at Russian buyers of Trump Organization properties but less attention has been paid to the all-cash purchases.
“We’ve long suspected that Donald Trump’s businesses were a front for money laundering and our research suggests it could be true,” said Harrell Kirstein, communicators director for the Trump War Room at American Bridge. “The millions of dollars in previously unreported, all-cash real estate deals we discovered raise troubling questions about who is funding his businesses, why, and what they’re getting in return.”
The group looked at real estate records at 2,769 condo units at 10 luxury buildings that the Trump Organization either develops or licenses in Miami-Dade and Broward counties in South Florida and in New York City; three Trump Towers, Trump Palace and Trump Royale, all in Sunny Isles Beach, Fla.; Trump Hollywood in Hollywood, Fla.; and Trump Soho, Trump Place, Trump World Tower and Trump International Hotel & Tower in New York — offering a snapshot into the buyers of Trump properties.