"The confiscation of a few yachts is no solution. What if, instead, we shut it all down?"
my pitch to fight kleptocracy, in the @FT
themes taken from AUTOCRACY INC https://t.co/QxurmnycKf— Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum) September 1, 2024
It’s hard to extract Anne Applebaum’s articles, because she doesn’t waste words. I didn’t hit a Financial Times paywall when I opened this; hope it works for the rest of you:
Donald Trump opened Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in 1983 and occupied the penthouse himself. The building was intended to advertise its owner’s wealth, and also to attract other rich tenants — including, ironically, the very secretive rich. Trump would sell 43 condos in Manhattan’s flashiest building to shell companies based in jurisdictions such as Panama, the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands, which conceal corporate records. He sold another six condos, for cash, to corporations based in Delaware, which has historically had the least transparent company laws in the US.
Not that this was anything exceptional: in the four decades that followed, more than a fifth of the sales in Trump-owned and Trump-licensed buildings, more than 1,300 properties, were made to anonymously owned shell companies, for cash, without a mortgage, which meant the purchasers did not have to have any uncomfortable conversations with lenders.
Some of those companies sold those condos again, very quickly, at much higher prices or at much lower prices — usually a sign that money laundering might have been the actual purpose of the purchase. A Trump-licensed building in Florida sold a two-bedroom condo to a shell company on August 12 2010, for example, for $956,768. That shell company sold the condo to another shell company, at a heavy loss, for $525,000 that same day.
All of these transactions were legal and there’s no evidence to suggest that Trump or his companies knew of or were complicit in money laundering schemes. They have been reported and described many times. The examples cited above come from a BuzzFeed investigation published six years ago, in 2018, but it wasn’t the only one. A Financial Times investigation in that same year also found that Russian, Kazakh and other post-Soviet oligarchs had probably been laundering money through Trump-licensed properties…
In the years since Trump’s 2016 election, a lot has been written about his autocratic instincts, about his scorn for ethical norms and about his attempt to retain power after losing the 2020 election. But as illustrated by the story of his real estate company’s reliance on dubious shell companies, Trump was already operating in an alternate ethical universe long before he became president, a world where the rules that most ordinary people live by are easily broken.
