the government in kazakhstan international investigators discovered after he was gone that half of all of the loan book for that bank between $8 billion and $12 billion in loans had been made to entities controlled to that bank chairman. must be nice, right? you run the bank, make loans to yourself then flee the country. you run the bank, make loans to yourself then flee the country. when he fled to london it became clear they weren t even loans at all. bank chairman was keeping all that money for himself, not planning on paying any of it back. in england he lived well. in a 15,000 foot mansion, a hundred-acre estate in the countryside. when the british court sentenced him to prison for what he had done the chairman got smart and fled that country too. went to france. in france he was ultimately arrested the following year at a villa on the french riviera by police who had disguised themselves as gardeners on the villa s grounds. i want to read that book.
text book red flags for money laundering. a bank engaged in massive fraud loans money to a company in another country which disperses that money among its subsidiaries then moving money back and forth between themselves in real estate deals that make no sense. money laundering is complex on purpose. that s the whole point of how you lose track of the money. when you involve overseas real estate deals, it becomes what a hallmark of what i understand of overseas money laundering and maybe it doesn t matter if anything gets built. but donald trump did make his million dollars. this is a news stories told by adam davidson. in new yorker magazine. a remarkable piece of reporting. adam makes two other points briefly noted about this story. first after the bta bank chairman fled the country, the kazakh government took country of the bank. which means the government has all of that banks files and transactions and archives and they know everything about the deal.
into looking into the deal the president s lawyer then threatened to lodge a former objection with rod rosenstein who had the power to dismiss mueller and end the inquiry. added if this specifically was investigated by robert mueller, the president s lawyers might see that as cause to fire special counsel. makes you wonder why they are so worried about this particular deal. joining us is adam davidson. adam, thank you for being here. thank you rachel. i wanted to have you here yesterday to talk about this but the president keeps talking about nazis so it s been awkward. it is important to talk about too. yeah. let me ask you, first of all, if i got anything wrong in describing this. you have written about a lot of complex deals involving the president. in this case it seems very clear that bank he was dealing with be with money he was dealing with, was obviously problematic. yeah. what the president s folks say
loan book, living it up in london before fleeing to france and being arrested by the cops/gardeners on the riviera. trump tower batumi never got built. not clear if it was intended to be built. right after trump signed the licensing deal his new business partner that got the money from the bank, they bought the tower. they paid $12 million to a company owned by a company, owned by a company, that was owned by themselves. for this big real estate development, in the city of batumi, company that partnered with donald trump was buying property from itself. which is a good way to just move $12 million around just for that part of it. if you are able to keep your eye on the money in this three card monty, what you are seeing is
subsidiary companies. follow the money from corrupt fraudulent kazahk bank, the money travels to a company in georgia which further distributes the money to a bunch of even smaller companies. that are very untraceable. fast forward to 2012. donald trump licenses his name to brand this seaside resort development in georgia. the one that got all the loans. that would be the trump tower batumi, i guess. did a big publicity campaign for the feel with georgia s president, for the use of his name, got paid a million dollars. went to georgia for big unveiling and no one appears to have asked where all of the money was coming from or why donald trump s new partner in this real estate deal had been able to secure all this money from bank that was literally all over the news at the time for being involved in this spectacular lurid fraud with its chairman running off with half the bank s