Now, apparently Donald Trump has no involvement except for the location. Cynical me raises an eyebrow, but it’s possible.
I would bet that whatever sorts of due diligence / anti-money laundering regulations there may be relative to real estate purchases by foreigners, the various trump properties were well known among the dirty wealthy for using a blind eye while doing them.
Beyond that there may be little direct malfeasance by trump-related entities.
OTOH, that also suggests that a thorough trawl through all the due diligence records of all trump properties would probably find legions of similar cases of blind-eye workmanship. Which could lead to quite a dragnet of ill-gotten gains.
Separately, while any given bit of poor workmanship on a particualr due diligence event can be explained away, when poor workmanship is evidently so common that it’s gotta be their de facto policy, that probably rises to a prosecutable offense of deliberately failing to follow the relevant regs.
What due diligence does a property owner need to do? If someone came up up to you tomorrow offering FMV + 10% for your house in currency and gold coins, are you obliged to report that to anyone or do a background check on the buyer? Does a transaction for a house over $10,000 even have to be reported if a bank is not used?
I’m not finding any connection to the main company, Sebrit, and Trump.
There’s a mention of a Brazilian company, Asperbras Group. Trump was working on Trump Towers Rio, back in 2016. I’m not finding any connection between any of the groups that were working on Trump Towers Rio and Asperbras, nor betwen Trump and Asperbras.
Minus any greater information, it does seem to be unrelated to the Trump family and their dealings except as a happenstance.
I have no idea what money laundering regs may exist for major real estate corporations. I suspect some regs do, but I do not know for sure. If not, it would be a very obvious oversight that Congress would probably have filled decades ago.
I merely suggest that if such regs exist, it’s likely a trump company would flout them, and further that the flouting would be well-known among the sorts of folks who want those regs flouted in their case.
What rules do or don’t apply to you or I selling our personal residence are immaterial. AFAIK there are no such rules for individual-to-individual transactions. But that does not imply there are no rules for businesses.
Nor is there any evidence there are rules for business. Just the assumption Trump = probably did it illegally.
To be fair, that’s generally a pretty safe assumption. Certainly, whatever he does is without regard for any illegality, and so if he does something that happens to be legal, it’s through no effort on his part.
Not questioning THAT. I’m just questioning the huuuuuuge leap from some guy buys a Trump Corporation apartment to Trump personally probably broke some laws that I don’t even know exist.
If you got that leap from me, you imagined about half of it.
I believe, as @Chronos suggested, that any trump business pays as close to zero attention to any laws to the degree they’ve found they can get away with it.
I did not suggest (or at least did not mean to suggest) that trump himself was personally aware of all the legal details of this transaction or of his real estate companies’ transactions in general. He’s real good at the mob boss program who knows nothing, but directs everything with hand-waves and innuendo, coupled to the careful hiring of people who’re good at reading those signals.
Assuming all the above is true, whether a successful prosecution leads to the company being fined a pittance, a lot, or the CEO / owner having criminal liability is a whole different set of questions. And so far trump has escaped personal criminal prosecution for darn near everything done in his name in business.
His prosecution history of political crimes is a little less favorable to him.
An aside and a bit of a mini-rant: I guess I can forgive a “reporter covering breaking news with a special emphasis on the entertainment industry, pop culture and sports” who “graduated from Northeastern University in 2017.” for not knowing that there are two countries with “Congo” in their names, but an editor should have caught this.
Or am I off base and everyone knows that Congo refers specifically to the Republic of the Congo and not the Democratic Republic of the Congo?