Newsweek has the long but fascinating story of how Donald Trump is connected to Deutsche Bank and why their relationship is suspicious.
For starters, Trump borrowed $640 million from Deutsche Bank in 2005 to fund construction of a new hotel in Chicago and personally guaranteed the loan. Three years later, when the real estate market crashed, Trump defaulted on the loan, still owing $330 million.
Deutsche sued for an immediate $40 million plus interest, legal fees, and costs. Trump countersued, claiming the crash partially was Deutsche's fault and, therefore, the bank owed him $3 billion in damages.
Two years later, Trump settled with the bank...by borrowing from another division of the bank.
He paid back Deutsche with a massive lifeline—from Deutsche. Only this time he eschewed its real estate team—which wanted nothing to do with him—and got a loan from its private wealth division.
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Around the same time he received his new line of credit, the bank was laundering money, according to the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS). Russian money. Billions of dollars that flowed from Moscow to London, then from London to New York—part of a scheme for which European and American regulators eventually punished the bank.
In the mid to late 2000s, Deutsche Bank built a curious partnership with Kremlin-connected Russian state banks, including Vneshtorgbank (VTB):
Everyone in Moscow understood that VTB was more than a bank. It had ties to Russian intelligence. Putin’s Federal Security Service (FSB) spy chief, Nikolai Patrushev, and his successor, Alexander Bortnikov, both sent their sons to work at VTB. The bank’s deputy chief executive, Vasily Titov, chaired the FSB’s public council.
VTB may have also had contacts with Trump associates, according to The New York Times. In November 2015, a few months after Trump announced he was running for president, one of his business partners, Felix Sater, wrote an email to Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, saying VTB had agreed to bankroll a Trump Tower Moscow project. Trump signed a letter of intent for the deal. When the project stalled, Cohen tried reaching out to Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitri Peskov, to help jump-start it. But it ultimately failed.
Newsweek goes on to explain in detail how Deutsche perpetuated a massive rubles-to-dollars money laundering scheme and how Trump could be connected:
What is clear, however, from the DFS report and conversations with sources in Moscow is that a Kremlin bank, VTB, run by proxies of the FSB, had seemingly captured Deutsche Bank’s Moscow outpost. The German bank’s London and New York divisions were economic beneficiaries of this arrangement, as they facilitated the illegal flight of capital by some well-connected Kremlin insiders.
While this was going on, Deutsche Bank in New York was lending hundreds of millions of dollars to the future American president, a man known to be litigious and a credit risk.
The author of this piece says he and a colleague met with Christopher Steele, whom the colleague knew, in London in 2016 to talk about Trump's potential Russian ties. This was before anyone, including the reporters, knew about Steele's dossier.
For the next 45 minutes or so, we asked Steele about Trump’s connections to Moscow. He offered helpful hints about following the money but little more.
In addition to questions about Deutsche Bank, we inquired about another Russian money-laundering operation, one that involved Putin’s cousin Igor. Between 2010 and 2014, Moscow bankers were sending cash out of the country through something called the Global Laundromat—a scheme that cleaned at least $20 billion...
Questions remain as to how these deals may be connected to Trump. Interestingly, both of his sons, on separate occasions have bragged about how they don't need American money because they have Russian funding.
In an interview with Prospect magazine, Richard Dearlove, the former head of British secret intelligence service MI6, summed up the suspicions surrounding the alleged connection between Trump, Russia and Deutsche Bank. “What lingers for Trump may be what deals—on what terms—he did after the financial crisis of 2008 to borrow Russian money when others in the West would not lend to him.”
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Now, nearly a year after BuzzFeed published Steele’s dossier, the bank is handing records over to Mueller, as the special counsel tries to figure out if there is a connection between the Russian laundromat and the president of the United States.
Deutsche bank also is connected to Jared Kushner.
In October 2016, it loaned him $285 million....The bank made the loan at a time when Kremlin representatives were eager to speak to Trump’s son-in-law, according to a timeline laid out in Kushner’s testimony to Congress.
In summary:
Today, the questions Mueller is asking seem to be the same questions that led us to meet with Christopher Steele last year. Namely: Was Trump hiding a connection to Russian money? And if so, was Moscow blackmailing him with that information? And how?
Read the full story: IS DONALD TRUMP’S DARK RUSSIAN SECRET HIDING IN DEUTSCHE BANK’S VAULTS? (Newsweek)