Despite decades of default worries, lawsuits, and acrimony, Deutsche Bank officials are said to have ignored deep internal concerns about Donald Trump and his finances and loaned him billions of dollars and introduced him to wealthy investors—including Russians—who were looking to keep their real-estate dealings anonymous. Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction, a new book by New York Times Financial Editor David Enrich due Feb. 18, reports that, in 2006, the German banking giant’s employees organized get-togethers for Trump and a Los Angeles partner with its rich clients—including some Russians—“who used anonymous shell companies to buy units” in a Hawaii hotel complex the future president was developing. Enrich reports that Deutsche, which has been caught enabling money-laundering for Russian oligarchs and misleading financial regulators in three countries, also helped Trump create “special purpose vehicles” that made it “easier for him quietly and inexpensively to acquire international properties for himself and his companies.” The financial entities also helped “the mogul strike under-the-radar deals in far-flung locales, including some that were popular destinations for people looking to hide assets,” an excerpt of the book reads.
The book claims a reckless pursuit of profits by Deutsche executives and compartmentalized sets of bankers led to the Trump loans, but they did come after officials fretted over his ties to organized-crime figures in Atlantic City and New York and concerns that his projects “were laundromats for illicit funds from countries like Russia, where oligarchs were trying to get money out of the country.” In the end, Enrich writes the entire real-estate industry was dealing with such “flight capital” and “the loans looked profitable, the relationship felt valuable, and the concerns went unheeded.”
Read it at The New York Times
