Trump’s Business Ties in Persian Gulf Raise Questions About His Allegiances
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/17/world/middleeast/trumps-business-ties-in-persian-gulf-raise-questions-about-his-allegiances.
LONDON — President Trump has done business with royals from Saudi Arabia for at least 20 years, since he sold the Plaza Hotel to a partnership formed by a Saudi prince. Mr. Trump has earned millions of dollars from the United Arab Emirates for putting his name on a golf course, with a second soon to open.
He has never entered the booming market in neighboring Qatar, however, despite years of trying.
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Mr. Trump is the first president in 40 years to retain his personal business interests after entering the White House. Other senior officials in the executive branch are required to divest their assets. Critics say his singular decision to hold on to his global business empire inevitably casts a doubt on his motives, especially when his public actions dovetail with his business interests.
“Other countries in the Middle East see what is happening and may think, ‘We should be opening golf courses’ or ‘We should be buying rooms at the Trump International,’” said Brian Egan, a State Department legal adviser under the Obama administration. “Even if there is no nefarious intent on behalf of the president or the Trumps, for a president to be making money from business holdings in sensitive places around the world is likely to have an impact.”
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Mr. Trump’s dealings with the Saudis extend back to at least 1995, when he sold the Plaza Hotel to a partnership formed by a Saudi prince and an investor from Singapore. The deal, for $325 million, enabled Mr. Trump to escape a default on his loans. (The same prince had reportedly bought Mr. Trump’s yacht for $18 million four years earlier.)
The Saudis “buy apartments from me,” he said in August 2015 at a rally in Mobile, Ala. “They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.”
His company filed paperwork to create eight inactive corporations in Saudi Arabia around that time, presumably contemplating a hotel or licensing deal in Jidda that has not come to fruition.
In May, the rulers of the kingdom agreed to invest $20 billion in a fund to build invest in American infrastructure, billed as part of an initiative Mr. Trump has championed. The $20 billion investment went to a fund set up by the money manager Blackstone, whose founder is close to Mr. Trump, his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner.
Mr. Trump made his first deal in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, in 2005, to build a hotel with a state-owned developer. He pulled out after the 2008 recession, but by 2010 Mr. Trump and two of his children, Ms. Trump and Donald Jr., were back in the region scouting for new business.
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Now some in Qatar are asking if missing a chance to do business with the Trumps might have been a mistake, Clayton Swisher, a journalist who works for the Qatar-owned Al Jazeera network, wrote in a recent column on the subject.
“Could anyone have imagined that five or 10 years ago, when businessmen turned down a New York mogul and reality TV host auditioning for its investment,” he wrote, “that they were jeopardizing the security of their country?”