As of: April 3, 2024, 1:00 p.m
By: Paula Völkner
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Shortly after Trump was able to avoid the seizure of his real estate, one of his luxury apartments in Manhattan is the focus of a corruption scandal.
Manhattan – Donald Trump, former US President and most likely the Republican candidate for the US election again, has just posted his bail in the fraud case and thereby prevented the seizure of his assets. Now, according to reports from the news platform
The Daily Beast,
the confiscation of an apartment in one of Trump's luxury towers is being discussed for a different reason. On Friday (March 29), a lawsuit from the public prosecutor's office was filed in federal court in Manhattan.
The public prosecutor's office alleges that the property was illegally acquired by the daughter of Congolese President Denis Sassou-Nguesso. It is about “the embezzlement, theft or embezzlement of hundreds of millions of dollars from the Congolese treasury,” says the lawsuit filed, which is available to the
Daily Beast
. Part of the money was said to have been used to purchase the luxury apartment in Manhattan for the daughter of the Congolese president.
Former President Donald Trump looks down worriedly. (Archive image) © IMAGO/Gripas Yuri/ABACA
Corruption allegations have previously been made against Congo's President Sassou-Nguesso and his family. Sassou-Nguesso, who has ruled the Central African state of Congo-Brazzaville dictatorially for over 35 years, embezzled
69 million euros between 2006 and 2011, according to reports in the
Neue Züricher Zeitung
. At that time too, the president tried to conceal the money laundering by depositing the money from the state treasury in 36 accounts that officially belonged to various relatives of the president.
The president's youngest son is also said to have embezzled $50 million to finance his luxurious lifestyle. This was reported by the non-governmental organization Global Witness in 2019. The connection between the President's daughter Claudia Sassou-Nguesso and Trump International was also made public for the first time in 2019 by the non-governmental organization Global Witness. The member of parliament is said to have embezzled $20 million in state money and bought a luxury apartment in the “Trump International Hotel & Tower” for $7 million. At the time, Global Witness called on the US Department of Justice to begin the process of seizing the apartment.
After the NGO's report was published in 2019, the Trump Organization already stated that the fees paid by condo owners did not go directly to Trump himself "for enrichment."
Trump Organization did not enrich itself from the payments
The apartment in Trump's building was paid for through a variety of front companies and middlemen. They routed the stolen funds from Congo's public coffers through facilities in Portugal, Cyprus, the British Virgin Islands and Brazil,
the lawsuit says, according to the
Daily Beast .
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The ownership situation in the Trump International Hotel & Tower is complicated. Although the Trump Organization manages the building and owns units in it, the rest of the building is owned by hundreds of individual owners. A spokeswoman
for the Trump Organization told the
Daily Beast
: "If this sale occurred, it was by a third-party owner who has nothing to do with our organization."
Most of Trump's wealth is in real estate
It was only on Monday that Trump posted a security deposit of $175 million as part of a civil lawsuit for business fraud, thereby preventing the seizure of his assets. Previously, there was talk of the confiscation of his real estate. Trump and his sons were found guilty in the trial of having artificially inflated the assets of their real estate empire over the years in order to obtain favorable conditions from banks and insurance companies.
After Trump's lawyers announced that he could not raise the required bail amount of $454 million, the court in New York reduced the amount. Most of Trump's wealth is in real estate, such as the Trump International Hotel & Tower in New York.
“Dirty money” is attracted to Trump buildings
Former federal prosecutor and former member of an organized crime task force that investigated possible criminal activity during the construction of Trump Tower, Kenneth McCallion, told the
Daily Beast
that “dirty money has long been attracted to Trump buildings.”
The Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier is said to have owned an apartment in Trump Tower, as did the suspected Russian gangster David Bogatin. “They paid cash for condos, held them for a few years, sold them, and then the proceeds from the sale were clean money,” McCallion told the
Daily Beast
.
In the case of the business involving the Congolese ruling family, Trump and his Trump Organization are not accused of any wrongdoing. The apartment, the lawsuit says, "resulted from a conspiracy to launder the proceeds of certain unlawful activities." The United States is attempting to repossess the property.
(pav)