General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsIn 2019 & 2014, Trump's Deutsche Bank Bankers "committed suicide."
Former Deutsche Bank Exec Connected to Trump Loans Dies by Suicide in MalibuThomas Bowers, who worked above Trumps personal banker, was 55
By Ian Spiegelman
LA Magazine-November 27, 2019
A former Deutsche Bank executive who reportedly signed off on some of the institutions unorthodox loans to Donald Trump killed himself in his Malibu home on November 19. Thomas Bowers, the onetime head of Deutsche Banks American wealth-management division, where he oversaw Trumps private banker, committed suicide by hanging, according to Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroners office. Bowers was 55.
Trumps relationship with Deutsche Bankwhich lent him around $2 billion after most other institutions had forsaken him for his history of defaults and bankruptcieshas come under investigation by two Congressional committees and the New York Attorney General, who are hoping the bank can shed light on Trumps elusive finances, according to the New York Times. At one point, Bowers had a close connection to those finances.
Rosemary T. Vrablic, a managing director at Deutsche Bank who became Trumps private banker in 2010 after being introduced by her client, Jared Kushner, reported directly to Bowers. Vrablic reportedly helped Trump secure loans from her bank, which Bowers approvedincluding more than $100 million to buy his Doral resort in Miamieven after Trump and Deutsche had to settle messy litigation over a Chicago loan that went bad.
Snip...
Bowers isnt the first Trump-connected Deutsche exec to commit suicide. In 2014, Deutsche derivatives analyst William S. Broeksmit, who reportedly had links to Trump and Russia, hung himself from a dog leash at his home in London.
Source:
https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/deutsche-bank-death/
https://www.fedortax.com/blog/deutsche-bank-nabbed-for-money-laundering-in-russian-laundromat-investigation
https://ips-dc.org/trumps-dirty-money/
mitch96
(13,904 posts)Kid Berwyn
(14,904 posts)Guy ticked off Vladimir Putin and Roman Abramovich.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/23/boris-berezovsky-vladimir-putin-feud
lapucelle
(18,254 posts)When his skyscraper proved a disappointment, Donald Trump defaulted on his loans, sued his bank, got much of the debt forgiven and largely avoided paying taxes on it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/27/business/trump-chicago-taxes.html#click=https://t.co/Cp9x0wSCYn
Kid Berwyn
(14,904 posts)New book Dark Towers tells of how family coordinated charm offensive to convince ageing supreme court justice to retire
by Julian Borger
The Guardian, Feb. 4, 2020
Excerpt...
Justin Kennedy was part of the US branch of Deutsche Bank from 1998 to 2009. Drawn to Trumps risk-taking and glamour, he became a Trump confidant, sitting with the real estate impresario at the US Open tennis or in Manhattan nightclubs, and chaperoning huge loans to finance Trumps real estate spending sprees.
Kennedy, who ran the banks commercial real-estate team, continued to lend to Trump even though Deutsche clients had suffered severe losses when Trumps casino business collapsed and he declared bankruptcy.
After Kennedy set up his own finance and property firm in Florida, Enrich writes, he continued to help other members of the Trump family Ivanka, Kushner and Donald Trump Jr arrange financing for projects in New York. The New York Observer, which was owned by Kushner, put Kennedy on a list of the 100 most powerful people in New York real estate.
Once Trump was in office, he went out of his way to congratulate Justice Kennedy on his son, calling him a special guy and saying how much his own children loved him.
Trumps flattery, Enrich writes, was part of a coordinated White House charm offensive designed to persuade the ageing justice for years, the courts pivotal swing vote that it was safe to retire, even with an unpredictable man in the Oval Office.
Continues...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/04/trump-family-anthony-kennedy-brett-kavanaugh-dark-towers
The money was nice and plentiful. Mixing politics, money-making A and treason, Trumps people Giuliani, Volker, Sondland, plus Pompeo and Perry worked to tilt US policy in Ukraine toward the corrupt bastards who looted the Treasury, privatized the resources, and ran the fledgling democracy into the ground. All that benefitted the Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs backed by Putin and served by Manafort. Regarding the money laundry: Craig Ungers work lifted up the lid...
Trumps Russian Laundromat
How to use Trump Tower and other luxury high-rises to clean dirty money, run an international crime syndicate, and propel a failed real estate developer into the White House.
By CRAIG UNGER
The New Republic, July , 2017
Excerpt...
Trump made his first trip to Russia in 1987, only a few years before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Invited by Soviet Ambassador Yuri Dubinin, Trump was flown to Moscow and Leningradall expenses paidto talk business with high-ups in the Soviet command. In The Art of the Deal, Trump recounted the lunch meeting with Dubinin that led to the trip. One thing led to another, he wrote, and now Im talking about building a large luxury hotel, across the street from the Kremlin, in partnership with the Soviet government.
Over the years, Trump and his sons would try and fail five times to build a new Trump Tower in Moscow. But for Trump, what mattered most were the lucrative connections he had begun to make with the Kremlinand with the wealthy Russians who would buy so many of his properties in the years to come. Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets, Donald Trump Jr. boasted at a real estate conference in 2008. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.
The money, illicit and otherwise, began to rain in earnest after the Soviet Union fell in 1991. President Boris Yeltsins shift to a market economy was so abrupt that cash-rich gangsters and corrupt government officials were able to privatize and loot state-held assets in oil, coal, minerals, and banking. Yeltsin himself, in fact, would later describe Russia as the biggest mafia state in the world. After Vladimir Putin succeeded Yeltsin as president, Russian intelligence effectively joined forces with the countrys mobsters and oligarchs, allowing them to operate freely as long as they strengthen Putins power and serve his personal financial interests. According to James Henry, a former chief economist at McKinsey & Company who consulted on the Panama Papers, some $1.3 trillion in illicit capital has poured out of Russia since the 1990s.
At the top of the sprawling criminal enterprise was Semion Mogilevich. Beginning in the early 1980s, according to the FBI, the short, squat Ukrainian was the key money-laundering contact for the Solntsevskaya Bratva, or Brotherhood, one of the richest criminal syndicates in the world. Before long, he was running a multibillion-dollar worldwide racket of his own. Mogilevich wasnt feared because he was the most violent gangster, but because he was reputedly the smartest. The FBI has credited the brainy don, who holds a degree in economics from Lviv University, with a staggering range of crimes. He ran drug trafficking and prostitution rings on an international scale; in one characteristic deal, he bought a bankrupt airline to ship heroin from Southeast Asia into Europe. He used a jewelry business in Moscow and Budapest as a front for art that Russian gangsters stole from museums, churches, and synagogues all over Europe. He has also been accused of selling some $20 million in stolen weapons, including ground-to-air missiles and armored troop carriers, to Iran. He uses this wealth and power to not only further his criminal enterprises, the FBI says, but to influence governments and their economies.
In Russia, Mogilevichs influence reportedly reaches all the way to the top. In 2005, Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian intelligence agent who defected to London, recorded an interview with investigators detailing his inside knowledge of the Kremlins ties to organized crime. Mogilevich, he said in broken English, have good relationship with Putin since 1994 or 1993. A year later Litvinenko was dead, apparently poisoned by agents of the Kremlin.
Continues...
https://newrepublic.com/article/143586/trumps-russian-laundromat-trump-tower-luxury-high-rises-dirty-money-international-crime-syndicate
Response to Kid Berwyn (Original post)
BrightKnight This message was self-deleted by its author.
exboyfil
(17,863 posts)Congressional aid to Dana Rohrabacher die in a mystery fall.
Kid Berwyn
(14,904 posts)Sep 28, 2018 In the News
A link to this article can be found here.
Excerpt...
Two sources told The Daily Beast on Friday morning that Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee wanted their GOP colleagues to disclose an account given to the panel by Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), who is considered the Republican legislator closest to the Kremlin.
The Republicans are trying to conceal from the voters their colleague Dana Rohrabachers Russia investigation testimony, said a committee source familiar with the issue. There were highly concerning contacts between Rohrabacher and Russians during the campaign that the public should hear about.
Snip...
Schiff, in a statement, also said the Republicans on the panel refused to provide all unredacted transcripts immediately to Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor investigating alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, as well as potential obstruction of justice, so that he may determine which witnesses may have perjured themselves before our committee.
Schiff added that the Republican majority again refused to subpoena documents and information Democrats have sought in the probe. They include records and testimony from Deutsche Bank concerning possible Russian money laundering, the phone records of Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, and Twitter DMs between WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, the Russian military-intelligence persona known as Guccifer2.0 and Trump campaign allies.
Source: https://quigley.house.gov/media-center/news-article/daily-beast-house-intel-gop-withholds-rohrabacher-and-wasserman-schultz-s
Grasswire2
(13,569 posts)Kid Berwyn
(14,904 posts)Barbara Res accuses ex-boss of 'making himself a part of the story'
Tom Embury-Dennis
The Independent (UK), Thursday 01 August 2019 16:21
Donald Trump lied about almost being on a helicopter when it crashed and killed five people, a former Trump Organization official has said.
Barbara Res, who was the company's vice-president of construction, told MSNBC the US president once fabricated a story that he decided at the last minute to avoid the 1989 flight.
News reports at the time quoted Trump sources as saying the business mogul was too busy to join three Trump Organization officials travelling from New York to Atlantic City.
Snip...
"You're going to hate me for this," Mr Trump is alleged to have told one of his vice-presidents before speaking to the reporter. "But I just can't resist. I can get some publicity out of this."
Continues...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-helicopter-crash-lie-barbara-res-new-york-organisation-a9033476.html
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)It just gets uglier and uglier. I'm not that old, but I really hope I live long enough to be around for the postmortem of this shitshow. I think it will be revealed that there has never been anything like it in the history of the world.
Kid Berwyn
(14,904 posts)By Matt Scuffham, Tom Sims, John ODonnell
Reuters, Nov. 3, 2020
NEW YORK/FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Deutsche Bank AG is looking for ways to end its relationship with President Donald Trump after the U.S. elections, as it tires of the negative publicity stemming from the ties, according to three senior ba nk officials with direct knowledge of the matter.
Deutsche Bank has about $340 million in loans outstanding to the Trump Organization, the presidents umbrella group that is currently overseen by his two sons, according to filings made by Trump to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics in July and a senior source within the bank. The three loans, which are against Trump properties and start coming due in two years, are current on payments and personally guaranteed by the president, according to two bank officials.
In meetings in recent months, a Deutsche Bank management committee that oversees reputational and other risks for the lender in the Americas region has discussed ways in which it could rid the bank of these last vestiges of the relationship, two of the three bank officials said. The bank has over the years lent Trump more than $2 billion, one of the officials said.
Snip...
Warrens Warning
Snip...
Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat member of the Senate banking committee, has previously called for an investigation into Deutsche Bank over its money laundering controls and has demanded answers from the lender about its relationship with Trump and his family. She told Reuters that she intended to keep pushing for a probe in the next administration.
You bet Im going to continue to fight for accountability and strong enforcement of our banking laws, especially for giant institutions like Deutsche Bank, she said.
Continues...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-deutsche-bank-exclusive/exclusive-tired-of-trump-deutsche-bank-games-ways-to-sever-ties-with-the-president-sources-idUSKBN27J0G0
PS: What William Colby, former Director of Central Intelligence, said:
The Latin American drug cartels have stretched their tentacles much deeper into our lives than most people believe. It's possible they are calling the shots at all levels of government.
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1463792
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)criminal activity to the public and the entire world. And to prosecuting them to the full extent of the law.
It's high time we stop allowing these privileged bastards to get away with anything and everything and allowing them to loot our banks and treasuries at our expense. The taxpayers are the ones who end up bailing them out and it's bullshit. Enough!