President Donald Trump’s sons are planning a new Trump Tower with help from a company linked to a sanctioned pro-Kremlin billionaire and another whose founder was investigated for alleged ties to Russian gangsters.
The Trump Organization is expanding the first family’s already astonishing $2.7 billion property empire with Trump Tower Tbilisi, a luxury 70-story apartment complex set to become the tallest building in Georgia, a former Soviet republic at the far reaches of Eastern Europe.
Eric Trump posted what appears to be an AI rendering of the building on X on Tuesday. “This marks our first project in the region and we are so excited to bring it to life!” he wrote.
The Daily Beast can reveal that one of the Trumps’ partners on the project, Tbilisi-based Archi Group, has ties to Russian-made oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, who is sanctioned by the U.S.
The founder of Georgia’s ruling party was added to the sanctions list in 2024 after brutal crackdowns against protesters who fought his attempts to steer the country closer to Moscow amid Putin’s war in Ukraine.
The Wall Street Journal first reported the project last month.
A second company involved in the plans, the New York-based Sapir Organization, was founded by Tamir Sapir, a late Trump associate with alleged links to Kremlin spies operating in the U.S. He was at one time subject to an FBI money-laundering and extortion probe as an alleged front for Russian organized crime.
The Trump Organization has faced repeated conflict-of-interest accusations during the president’s second stint in the White House. This includes raking in huge profits from digital assets as the president rolls back regulations on the cryptocurrency industry, and from multi-million-dollar real estate deals in the Middle East and beyond.
Eric and Donald Trump Jr., as founders of the family’s World Liberty Financial crypto firm, helped broker a deal last year in which an Abu Dhabi state-backed fund, chaired by the UAE’s national security adviser, routed around $2 billion through the Trump group’s digital asset. It fell just weeks before Trump loosened AI-chip restrictions on the Emirates.
Donald Jr. also holds an advisory role and multimillion-dollar stake at drone-maker Unusual Machines, which paid off in October when the firm landed its biggest-ever U.S. Army contract, months after his father signed an executive order directing the Pentagon to prioritize American-made drones.
The Trump Organization has meanwhile pocketed upwards of $20 million in licensing fees over the past year from Dar Global, the Saudi developer that has emerged as the Trump Organization’s main Gulf partner.
Those and other deals have seen the family’s wealth has boom by $5 billion since Trump took office again in 2025. Both Eric and Donald Jr. have denied trading off their father’s name.
It’s also not the first time the group has looked to Georgia as a prospective investment opportunity. In 2012, Trump announced plans to build another luxury apartment building in the coastal city of Batumi, only to abandon them over conflict-of-interest concerns after winning the 2016 presidential election. An investment fund backed by Ivanishvili later took over the project.
Archi Group’s founder, Ilia Tsulaia, is a former member of parliament for Ivanishvili’s party, and featured as an alleged financier for the Ivanishvili regime on a list of prospective sanctions targets reportedly submitted by U.S. lawmakers to then-incoming Secretary of State Marco Rubio last January. No sanctions have been imposed on Tsulaia.
Tsulaia’s firm previously received an estimated $7.2 million in financing from Ivanishvili’s government to build a concrete block factory in Tbilisi, according to a 2019 watchdog report by Transparency International, reviewed by the Daily Beast.
Those payments raised corruption concerns, as they fell during the same window—between 2016 and 2018—that Tsulaia and his business partners donated hundreds of thousands of dollars back to both the ruling party and Ivanishvili’s preferred presidential candidate.
The Trumps’ American partner on the Tbilisi tower deal has its own connections to the former Soviet Union. Alex Sapir, the Sapir Organization’s chief executive, told the Wall Street Journal that the Georgia project represents an opportunity to “contribute in a meaningful way” to the country where his late father, the group’s founder, was born.
Tamir Sapir emigrated to the U.S. in the mid-1970s and, with fellow Soviet émigré Sam Kislin, set up a Manhattan electronics store that catered heavily to Soviet diplomats and trade officials passing through New York.
The shop, according to investigative journalist Craig Unger’s 2021 book American Kompromat, doubled up as a KGB resource, selling consumer electronics guaranteed to be free of American bugs while allegedly serving as a hunting ground for intelligence “spotters” scouting prospective Western assets. Unger wrote that Kislin “denied having any relationship with the KGB or any other Soviet entities.”
Trump himself was allegedly one of Sapir and Kislin’s early clients at the store. Kislin told Bloomberg in 2017 that Trump purchased 200 televisions on credit around 1980 to furnish his newly acquired Commodore Hotel, and later awarded the pair a contract to provide sets for another two Trump properties.
Sapir went on to parlay his contacts with visiting Soviet dignitaries into a lucrative import-export business, channeling his profits into the New York property market where he amassed a vast real estate portfolio with a net worth that peaked at an estimated $2 billion, according to Forbes. He died in 2014.
Declassified FBI documents, reviewed by the Daily Beast, show that by 1998, the bureau was actively investigating Sapir for money laundering and extortion, with one internal memo stating he was believed to be acting “as a front for Russian organized crime money.” He was never charged, and long denied any mob ties.
Trump eventually went into business with Sapir, whose daughter threw her 2007 wedding at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. They worked together on Trump SoHo, a $450 million condo-hotel in lower Manhattan.
A constellation of other post-Soviet financiers behind that project later drew scrutiny from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the president’s alleged Russia ties, which Trump has repeatedly decried as a Democratic Party hoax designed to smear his name.
The Trump Organization, Archi Group, and the Sapir Organization did not respond to requests for comment on this story.
Eric Trump, in a press release introducing Trump Tower Tbilisi, said: “The Trump name is synonymous with some of the most luxurious real estate developments in the world, and Trump Tower Tbilisi stands as a continuation of that legacy. We are proud to bring this globally recognized standard of excellence to Georgia and are especially pleased to collaborate with such respected and professional developers on this project.”
