The story as I originally heard it is very different. For instance, this…
“…After making some repairs, Trump put it back on the market in 2006 for $125m…”
Way I heard it, it sat neglected and unoccupied, but Trump made “repairs”? Well, then, he has receipts. Anyone seen them? Got them? “Repairs” might mean anything from major overhauls to replacing the mail box.
You *know *he didn’t actually pay any of those contractor bills, right?
My experience with self made billionaires (met several, interacted with 2 multiple times in their core business and saw how they invested) is that they generally are critical investors who tend not to overpay. Some might call them tightfisted. They didn’t make their money by being overly generous. Having a net worth of $10B, with cash, in a global market free fall with no end in sight (at that time), is not the time savvy billionaires pay huge premiums. It is the time that savvy billionaires pick up great assets on the cheap. Then again maybe it was the dream of a Russian billionaire to pay a huge premium for a trophy property (Steve Ballmer being an example of a billionaire that didn’t want to lose out yet again for his own basketball team).
That said, taking a deeper look at this specific transaction is not without merit. And I guarantee you that Robert Mueller’s financial fraud swat team has already done so. Will see if there is fire behind this smoke when Mueller has put a bow on the investigation.
It might. Since the house was gaudy and was torn down anyway, and the empty lots look to be selling for close to $100m altogether, does it matter? Clearly the repairs, whether token or major overhauls, didn’t affect the value one way or the other, the land is what mattered. I was just repeating what was reported. What else did you hear that was “very different”?
Sold at auction for $45 million? And nobody else saw the massive potential for profit that our real estate genius saw? Remarkable. Did he include this in his Trump University “How to Tycoon” courses? You know, the one where he paid out a $25 million dollar fine for, well, fraud?
Well. let’s have a look, whaddaya say? Then we’ll see all those receipts for “repairs”, the tax assessment value of the property, stuff like that there, and then we can say nothing to see here.
Then.
I didn’t put everything I found in the OP for fear of making it too long, but indeed, paying a huge premium for a trophy property was kinda his thing.
Furthermore, as I said before, it’s really not clear that he paid a premium, because it’s not like you can compare it to other homes sold in the area. If he’d managed to sell each of the 3 lots for 50+ mil like some people thought, he’d have looked all smart and stuff.
Not to keep beating this drum but I just don’t get it. This was a public sale, the buyer is known, where he got his money is known… it just doesn’t smell like money laundering, and the Florida authorities have had 10 years to poke at it if they thought anything was up. Other than the buyer being Russian and the seller being an unpopular president, what red flags are there?
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and suggest you aren’t very familiar with the Florida authorities. 
Did the property look like this when he sold it? I am seeing what looks like might be beach front (which would explain the viewing arc room). Beachfront property is absurdly expensive.
Indeed, I don’t know which one of these is the before and which one is the after.
eta: And here’s the google maps link for those interested.
And getting scarcer with global warming and sea level rise. Palm Beach property will be among the first to disappear under the waves - draw what moral lesson you like from that.
More specifically, such a case would be investigated by the state Attorney General. That is currently Pam Bondi, who btw dropped the state’s fraud case about Trump University right after receiving a substantial campaign donation from him. He has more where that came from, if need be.
I’m sure the FBI has an office in Miami, as does the IRS, plus local authorities. Point being, if Rybolovlev and Trump were trying to do something sneaky with money, they couldn’t have picked a more public way to do it. There were newspaper articles about the sale of this property, with both of their names attached to it plus the amounts transferred. They made absolutely no attempt to fly under the radar of whatever authorities might be interested. Hell of a way to launder money.
Contrast that with the link upthread, where drug kingpins are snapping up no-name condos with shell companies.
Trump needs to know who he owes a favor to. This does not sound like it was a good investment choice on the part of Rybolovlev unless along with it comes access to and favors from the president of the United States.
At this point, a Trump presidency wasn’t even a gleam in the Devil’s eye.
Ah right…good point.
One still has to wonder at the seemingly bad investment choice made here. I cannot imagine Rybolovlev wanting to make that deal unless there was something else to the whole thing. Considering Trump’s business ties to Russia this seems too much to be a coincidence. Kinda like Bush selling the Texas Rangers for thee times what he bought into it for ten years earlier (Bush made 25x his initial investment). Or Hillary Clinton turning a $1,000 commodity investment into $100,000 in a market where that pretty much never happened in that time frame.
But of course all these things are legal so lucky for them I guess.
The problem is, this is not like drug kingpins laundering money. It is something altogether different. And the parties involved were not like unto fugitives trying to stay under the radar. If you are doing something massively illegal, why bother to be sneaky about? Do it out in the open and people will get the impression that there is nothing wrong with it because you are doing out in the open. And if you get caught doing something wrong, you do not lose more, at that level, than you would have by trying to hide what you were doing. For some people, brash and shameless works so well, they may not ken any other way to operate.
Which, of course, it didn’t. In 2008, when this deal was done, the idea of Trump being president was ludicrous. Unless Rybolovlev was ludicrously prescient it’s far fetched that this deal was done in the hopes of ultimately having influence over Trump. What could a multi billionaire possibly need from a relatively middling property developer?
Here’s a NYTimes article from 2012:
There’s more in the article. From what I can gather, they negotiated the price before the crash and there was some advantage to Rybolovlev in his divorce proceedings if he completed the deal instead of walking away.
See post #35 above.
One question unanswered is *how *does a real estate transaction launder money?
Let’s say I have a mountain of ill-begotten gains. I have millions of dollars in cash and my ultimate goal is to put the money in the bank.
So if I haul the cash into a bank lobby and try to deposit it, they’ll take it and count it, but they’ll fill out a form indicating the large cash deposit and eventually the government will hear about it. They could then start surveilling me and eventually prove I’m a criminal or at least prove I might be a criminal and seize the bank account.
So far this makes sense. If I go buy a condo in Miami instead, doesn’t the seller submit that same form that lets the government know that cash was used? Won’t the government eventually get around to investigating and be able to seize it, like they would seize a bank account?
What is the difference?
Breaking Bad style money laundering, at least it sort of made sense. That carwash was making millions! There was an actual business, money brought in in cash, the business dutifully deposited it’s proceedings and paid all the appropriate taxes. The only red flag was the business was making too much for it’s size, but that can be hard to measure without the government doing a detailed investigation. There is nothing that would make it obvious. Though I might note that a machine learning model could probably work.
No, but the seller is an American. Rybolovlev may have wanted to funnel money as political influence into the US system but FEC regs prohibit contributions from foreign nationals. So the two parties negotiate a deal where many millions of dollars will melt into the Trump organization and find their way into campaigns and lobbying that Rybolovlev favors. That would be a particularly detestable form of money laundering.
