Thread by @karolcummins

Deutsche Bank ♥️ Trump

📌A Profitable Decades-long Love Affair

📌Why on earth would Deutsche Bank (DB) continue to lend money to a notorious loan defaulter like Trump?

📌This is a key part re TrumpRussia

‼️Theory:‼️

Is it logical to conclude that Russia funnels (launders) money into Deutsche Bank, which then ‘washes’ money via back door deals & then loans the money to Trump.

Ergo is DB the middleman between RU & Trump earning sizable fees on every transaction? Win, win, no?

Russia:

Investigators are seeking evidence in a massive money laundering scheme involving Deutsche Bank about the practice of hiding money offshore to elude tax collectors and government regulators.
npr.org/2018/11/29/671…

📌Employees of the bank allegedly assisted customers in setting up offshore firms to avoid anti-money laundering safeguards when transferring money to accounts at Deutsche Bank.
npr.org/2018/11/29/671…

📌Deutsche Bank has been fined & criticized for its poor record of preventing money laundering.

DB confirmed that even after it was fined for helping RU clients wash some $10 BILLION, its mechanisms to stop such criminal activity were still inefficient.
npr.org/2018/11/29/671…

Deutsche Bank stated, "The investigation has to do with the Panama Papers case." It added, "We are cooperating fully with the authorities."
npr.org/2018/11/29/671…

📌In recent years, Deutsche Bank has been in the news not only for its prominence in the Panama Papers, but also for its ties to President Trump, in a tumultuous relationship that goes back some 20 years.
npr.org/2018/11/29/671…

Trump & DB were deeply entwined, their symbiotic bond born of necessity & ambition on both sides: a real estate mogul made toxic by polarizing rhetoric & a pattern of costly defaults, & a bank with intractable financial problems & a history of misconduct.
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌Over nearly two decades, DB’s leaders repeatedly saw red flags surrounding Trump.

📌There was a disastrous bond sale, a promised loan that relied on a banker’s forged signature, wild exaggerations of Mr. Trump’s wealth, even a claim of an act of God.
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

‼️LENDING HISTORY

📌In 1998, Trump a failed casino owner was considered a Wall Street pariah—his bankruptcies had cost banks hundreds of millions of dollars. #Deadbeat
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📌The relationship had paid off. Mr. Trump used loans from Deutsche Bank to finance skyscrapers and other high-end properties, and repeatedly cited his relationship with the bank to deflect political attacks on his business acumen.
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📌Deutsche Bank used Mr. Trump’s projects to build its investment-banking business, reaped fees from the assets he put in its custody and leveraged his celebrity to lure American clients.
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📌Late ‘90s, DB recruited a handful of Goldman Sachs traders to lead a push into commercial real estate. One was JUSTIN KENNEDY, the son of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.

📌Another was Mike Offit, whose father was the writer Sidney Offit.
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📌In 1998, a broker contacted him to see if he would consider lending to a Wall Street pariah: Mr. Trump, who was then a failed casino magnate whose bankruptcies had cost banks hundreds of millions of dollars.

📌Nevertheless Mr. Offit took the meeting.
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📌Trump was looking for a $125 million loan to pay for gut renovations of 40 Wall Street, his Art Deco tower in Lower Manhattan.

📌Mr. Offit was impressed by the pitch, and the loan sailed through Deutsche Bank’s approval process.
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

https://twitter.com/karolcummins/status/1104182719649476609?s=21

📌Trump soon came looking for $300 million for what is now known as Trump World Tower. The loan was approved.

📌He wanted hundreds of millions more for his Trump Marina casino in Atlantic City.

📌Mr. Offit pledged to line up cash for that, too.
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌1998: Trump is starting work on what he says will be the tallest residential building in the world, a $360 million slender glass monolith across the street from the United Nations complex.
nytimes.com/1998/10/16/nyr…

📌Mr. Kennedy now in a senior role, kept lending to Trump, including to buy the General Motors building in Manhattan. Occasionally, Justice Kennedy stopped by Deutsche Bank’s offices to say hello to the team.

nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌In 2003, a Deutsche Bank team led by Richard Byrne — a former casino-industry analyst who had known Mr. Trump since the 1980s — was hired to sell bonds on behalf of Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts. To whom did they sell the bonds? RU?
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌In 2004, Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts defaulted on the bonds. Deutsche Bank’s clients suffered steep losses. This arm of the investment-banking division stopped doing business with Trump.
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌Trump wooed bankers with golfing outings, trips to Mar-A-Lago & flights on his private plane.

📌In a Trump Tower meeting, he told Mr. Kennedy that his daughter Ivanka would be in charge of the Chicago project.
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌TRUMP INFLATED THE VALUE OF HIS ASSETS

There were warning signs.

📌Mr. Trump told Deutsche Bank his net worth was about $3 billion, but when bank employees reviewed his finances, they concluded he was worth about $788 million
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌The above detail is significant as DB could then state they went by the books (followed protocols) trusting Trump’s inflated valuations as a justification for the loan approvals.

📌A senior investment-banking executive said in an interview that he and others cautioned that Trump should be avoided because he had worked with people in the construction industry connected to organized crime. ORLY?
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌In spite of the above, Deutsche Bank agreed in 2005 to lend Mr. Trump more than $500 million for the project. He personally guaranteed $40 million of it, meaning the bank could come after his personal assets if he defaulted.
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

By 2008, the riverside skyscraper, one of the tallest in America, was mostly built. But because the economy was sagging, Mr. Trump struggled to sell hundreds of condominium units. The bulk of the loan was due that November.
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌Then the financial crisis hit, and Mr. Trump’s lawyers sensed an opportunity.

📌A provision in the loan let Mr. Trump partially off the hook in the event of a “force majeure,” essentially an act of God, like a natural disaster.
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌Get this folks: because Alan Greenspan had called the financial crisis a “tsunami”, Trump cried it’s a “force majeure,” I am off the hook!! 🙄🙄🙄
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌Days before the loan was due, Trump sued Deutsche Bank, citing the force majeure language and seeking $3 billion in damages. Deutsche Bank countersued and demanded payment of the $40 million that Trump had personally guaranteed.
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌Note: Lawsuits are another vehicle by which money launderers wash money.

📌With the suits in court, senior investment-banking executives severed ties with Trump.

📌Don’t worry, they will kiss & make-up soon.
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌Not long after Mr. Trump got the Chicago loan — but before it went south — Deutsche Bank was expanding its private-banking division, which served the superrich & hired a Ms. Vrablic ($3M salary)

(Trump invited her to the inauguration.)
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌In 2010, Deutsche Bank and Mr. Trump settled their litigation over the Chicago loan. Trump agreed to repay most of what he owed by 2012.
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌One of Ms. Vrablic’s clients was Jared Kushner, who regarded Ms. Vrablic as the best banker he had ever worked with.

📌Trump was looking for a loan so Kush introduced him to Ms. Vrablic
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌📌Of note, the bank previously had an informal ban on business with the Kushners because Jared’s father, Charles, was a felon.
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌Trump wanted to buy the Doral Golf Resort and Spa. He needed more than $100 million for the 72-hole property.

📌However Deutsche Bank determined he was overvaluing some of his real estate assets by as much as 70%.

Let that sink in....70%
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌Trump also expressed interest in another loan from the private-banking division: $48 million for the same Chicago property that had provoked the two-year court fight.
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌Trump told the bank he would use that loan to repay what he still owed the investment-banking division.

📌Even by Wall St. standards, borrowing money from one part of a bank to pay off a loan from another was an extraordinary act of financial chutzpah.
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

Ms. Vrablic and Mr. Bowers tentatively agreed to both loans, however, they needed approval up the chain of command.

nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌Investment-banking execs pushed back.

📌Lending to Trump again would be foolish, they argued, and signal to clients that they could default and even sue the bank.

nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌📌Despite those concerns, a committee in Frankfurt, which evaluated loans based on risks to the bank’s reputation, signed off, but of course.
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

“There is no objection from the bank to proceed with this client,” wrote Stuart Clarke, the chief operating officer for the Americas, in a Dec. 5, 2011, email, according to a recipient.
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DB wired the money to Trump.

📌The loans carried relatively low interest rates, executives said, but the business promised to be profitable:

📌As part of the deal, Trump would hold millions of dollars in a personal account, generating fees for the bank.
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

Deutsche Bank also lent money to Donald Trump Jr. for a South Carolina manufacturing venture that would soon go bankrupt. It provided a $15 million credit line to Mr. Kushner and his mother.
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌In 2012, Jared Kushner recommended The Mortgage Observer, one of the publications he owned, write a flattering profile of Ms. Vrablic.

📌The editor, Carl Gaines, knew Mr. Kushner was her client and objected.
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌In early 2014, Mr. Trump and his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, approached Ms. Vrablic about a loan to buy the Buffalo Bills franchise.

📌He needed to show the league he had the financial wherewithal to pull off a transaction that could top $1 billion.
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌📌Mr. Trump asked Ms. Vrablic if the bank would be willing to make a loan and handed over bare-bones financial statements that estimated his net worth at $8.7 billion.
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

Mr. Cohen testified to Congress last month that the documents exaggerated Mr. Trump’s wealth. Deutsche Bank executives had reached a similar conclusion. They nonetheless agreed to vouch for Mr. Trump’s bid, according to an executive involved.
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌Mr. Trump’s bid did not win, but
a federal agency had selected Mr. Trump to transform the Old Post Office Building in DC into a luxury hotel.

📌Hmmmm, why/how was Trump selected to win the bid to transformed the DC Post Office?
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌However, his financial partner — the private equity firm Colony Capital, run by Tom Barrack Jr. — pulled out. Trump needed nearly $200M.
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌Because of his decades-long pattern of defaults and his increasingly polarizing political rhetoric —Trump remained untouchable for most banks.

📌📌However Ms. Vrablic was always willing to help
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌A $170 million loan to pay for the overhaul of the Old Post Office went through in 2015, and Mr. Trump added more money to his brokerage account.

(In May 2016, he reported up to $46 million of stocks and bonds in the account.)
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌On Aug. 6, 2015, Mr. Trump participated in the first Republican presidential debate.
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌In the intervening hours, Mr. Trump had used a black Sharpie to sign documents for another loan from Deutsche Bank: $19 million for the Doral resort.

📌That brought to more than $300 million the total lent under Ms. Vrablic.
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌In early 2016, Mr. Trump asked Ms. Vrablic for one final loan, for his golf course in Turnberry, Scotland.

📌Ms. Vrablic said yes, but a fight soon erupted.
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

Ms. Vrablic appealed. Senior executives, including Christian Sewing, who would become CEO in 2018, were shocked that DB would consider lending Trump money during the campaign, bank officials said.
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📌The bank’s reputational risk committee killed the transaction in March 2016.

📌That same month, as The Times was preparing an article about Mr. Trump’s excommunication from Wall Street, he cited his warm relationship with Deutsche Bank.
nytimes.com/2016/05/24/bus…

Post elex, a review also found that Deutsche Bank had produced a number of “exposure reports” that flagged the growing business with Mr. Trump, but that they had not been adequately reviewed by senior executives.
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

If Mr. Trump were to default on his loans, Deutsche Bank would have to choose between seizing his assets or cutting him a lucrative break — a situation the bank would rather resolve in private...
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

📌The House’s financial services and intelligence committees opened investigations into Deutsche Bank’s relationship with Trump.

📌Those inquiries, as well as the New York attorney general’s investigation, come at a perilous time for Deutsche Bank,
nytimes.com/2019/03/18/bus…

@threadreaderapp unroll please and thank you.

#DeutscheBank
#Trump