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| What was going to be Trump Hotel, Baku, Azerbaijan |
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Show opens with deep background on
large construction projects and the nation of Azerbaijan, then
09:40
Maddow When stuff stops
making any financial sense on the surface, that's where it often starts to make
sense when it comes to stories related to our new president.
Reporter Adam
Davidson has a new piece out in the New Yorker today on what may
end up being the next major line of inquiry into our new president, and it is
starting to me to look like one of the best explanations we have had yet about
why the White House is so dramatically freaked out the prospect there might be
an independent investigation into this president and his foreign contacts (background
on other Bechtel construction project and Iranian Revolutionary Guard).
11:40
The Revolutionary
Guard in Iran have front companies in everything from oil and gas to illegal
alcohol importing to weapons manufacturing, to construction, lots of
construction. The Revolutionary Guard
need a lot of money for what they do around the world. But with the sanctions
on them. . . they need what appear to be legitimate business transactions, the
bigger the better, to receive and to spend as much money as possible, to move
as much revolutionary guard money as is possible through seemingly legitimate
means so that Revolutionary Guard money becomes apparently legitimate business
money, which is much easier to move around the globe so you can finance
terrorist groups or whatever else it is you need to do.
So if you're the
Revolutionary Guard, you need front companies that can do what appears to be
legitimate business. (Background on
money moving through contracts for Guard )
13;20
The transportation
minister in Azerbaijan has a government salary of about twelve thousand dollars
a year. Somehow on that salary he has
become a billionaire.
We're sort of all
learning now that this is one of the things to watch for in international
corruption, money laundering, bribery schemes: Look for deals that on the
surface make no financial sense. Because
they're going to make sense in some other way.
Look for example at this.
13:50 – graphic:
Adam Davidson writes in the New Yorker:
“Reaching the
property is surprisingly difficult; the tower stands amid a welter of on-ramps,
off-ramps, and overpasses. During the
nine days I was in town, I went to the site half a dozen times, and on each
occasion I had a comical exchange with a taxi driver who had no idea which
combination of turns would lead to the building’s entrance.”
So it's literally hard
to get into. This is a picture from one
angle- more photos in New Yorker- (background and jokes)
14:50
But this building,
whatever you think of its looks, it doesn't make sense for several reasons. Not
just because there's no way to get there. . . .
15:10
But look at this, we've
marked where that hotel is in Azerbaijan, it's right on the Caspian Sea. It's not where all the other hotels are. In what's described as not a particularly good
neighborhood, it's by an extensive field of rail yards. It's about an hour’s walk from where any
other well off Western tourist might be expected to stay in this town. It's weird for a luxury building.
Until December 2016,
that weird building that you can't get into in the middle of nowhere next to the
rail yards, that was supposed to be the site of the new Trump Tower in
Azerbaijan- in all its Georgia O’Keefe glory way over there away from everything
else.
You might find it
hard to picture what's weird about the location. In 2014 Ivanka was on a business trip (story of
Ivanka posting a Facebook video of how awesome the view was from her Azerbaijan
hotel room).
16:15
Ivanka: Check it out, the view from my Balcony. The Flame Towers. And the Caspian Sea.
Maddow; That is in fact a lovely view there, right
next to the Caspian Sea. That's nowhere
near the building she's there to work on, that's not where the Trump Tower was going,
we think she's at the Four Seasons, which is five kilometers away and an hour’s
walk away from where the Trump building was going up in the middle of town,
nowhere near the sea, right, in all its hard to look at glory.
This building in
this random neighborhood in Baku Azerbaijan, it's a business project that really
doesn't make sense on the surface. It's a
huge luxury development in a city that isn’t sustaining its current luxury properties,
it's in the wrong part of town for a luxury property, no way was ever designed to
get into the property, why was this built, how could it ever make financial sense
to pour this much in terms of resources into something that doesn't even seem like
it was designed to work?
This was supposed to
be Trump Tower Baku Azerbaijan. One
month after our election, the Trump organization abandoned this project and they
pulled out.
And here’s what you
need to know.
The Trump family’s
business partner in that project was the family of the Transportation Minister
of Azerbaijan, the one who made all those lucrative partnerships, the inexplicably
lucrative deals, with companies that really do appear to just be fronts for the
Iranian Revolutionary Guard, apparently helping them launder money and making his
own family wildly wealthy in the process.
He might greenlight anything.
18:21
American businesses
are free to do business anywhere it is legal to do business in the world but American
businesses are not allowed to accept any funds if the origin of those funds is
a sanctioned organization like the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
And you [as a business
person] have to check it out, you have to know.
American businesses are not allowed to participate in business deals
with partners who are acting illegally and you have to know, you have to check
it out. Looking the other way is not a
defense. (story of a handbag company
whose founder was convicted of doing business in Azerbaijan with a corrupt
partner).
If you're in American
business you're expected to do your due diligence to make sure your business partners
are not accepting bribes, they're not corrupt.
19:20
In the case of
this inexplicable Trump building project that was inexplicably abandoned right after
the election, Trump and his family were in business with the cartoon caricature
of corruption in that country, and I mean that almost literally. In the fall of
2014, four months before Ivanka Trump was on the balcony of the Four Seasons
showing off the Caspian Sea from a normal hotel location, the family was she
was there to do business with was featured in this issue of Foreign Policy Magazine,
look at the headline:
19:52
“The Corleones of the
Caspian”
Under the Foreign
Corrupt Practices Act, which is U.S. law, not to put too fine a point on it,
under that Act, you cannot go into business with “the Corleones of the Caspian.”
You must as an American business do due diligence to make sure your partners
are not corrupt, [especially] sponsoring international terrorism like the Iranian
Revolutionary Guard. It is a violation
of U.S. law to do business with a partnership like that.
The new president,
he and his organization backed out of this deal a month after the election, not
before he received millions of dollars from the deal, we know that from the financial filings he made in the election.
***
Transcribed by City
of Angels Blog Winging It Transcripts, documenting the coup that is currently
destroying democracy in the United States with plans to go global with a fascist
corporatocracy that will suck out oil and resources and destroy the planet.
Just another day
in California.
***
Links in this post
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy9Qtf3P6Nw
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/13/donald-trumps-worst-deal
Posted By Kay Ebeling, blogger
Wondering if a City of Angels could survive this
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