With sales of Trump condos falling and buildings trying to get out of their deals with the Trump Organization and rebrand as something else, along with the president’s refusal to ever release his tax records, the finances of Trump and the Trump organization have perhaps never been more in need of scrutiny.
Following an exhaustive investigation, BuzzFeed News learned that since the 1980s, more than one-fifth of the condominiums that Trump sold in the United States were purchased by shell companies in all-cash transactions that didn’t requite a lender to review a mortgage application. According to the U.S. Treasury, these two characteristics tend to be linked with money laundering:
Trump condo sales that match Treasury’s characteristics of possible money laundering totaled $1.5 billion, BuzzFeed News calculated. They accounted for 21% of the 6,400 Trump condos sold in the US. Those figures include condos that Trump developed as well as condos that others developed in his name under licensing deals that pay Trump a fee or a percentage of sales.
Some of the secretive sales date back more than three decades, long before recent worries that Russians tried to influence Trump by pouring millions of dollars into his businesses.
However, according to the records reviewed by BuzzFeed, the number of secret, all-cash sales surged in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
Previously, the Trump Organization was accused by a former development partner of ignoring concerns that a property in Panama City had allegedly become a front for money laundering and other organized crime techniques.
(Via Buzzfeed News)