General Discussion

Former Deutsche Bank Exec Connected to Trump Loans Dies by Suicide in Malibu

Thomas Bowers, who worked above Trump’s 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 institution’s unorthodox loans to Donald Trump killed himself in his Malibu home on November 19. Thomas Bowers, the onetime head of Deutsche Bank’s American wealth-management division, where he oversaw Trump’s private banker, committed suicide by hanging, according to Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner’s office. Bowers was 55.

Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank—which lent him around $2 billion after most other institutions had forsaken him for his history of defaults and bankruptcies—has come under investigation by two Congressional committees and the New York Attorney General, who are hoping the bank can shed light on Trump’s 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 Trump’s 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 approved—including more than $100 million to buy his Doral resort in Miami—even after Trump and Deutsche had to settle messy litigation over a Chicago loan that went bad.

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Bowers isn’t 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/

Book reveals Trump effort to persuade Justice Kennedy to step aside for Kavanaugh

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 Trump’s 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 Trump’s real estate spending sprees.

Kennedy, who ran the bank’s commercial real-estate team, continued to lend to Trump even though Deutsche clients had suffered severe losses when Trump’s 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.

“Trump’s flattery,” Enrich writes, “was part of a coordinated White House charm offensive designed to persuade the ageing justice – for years, the court’s pivotal swing vote – that it was safe to retire, even with an unpredictable man in the Oval Office.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/04/trump-family-anthony-kennedy-brett-kavanaugh-dark-towers

Trump’s 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 Leningrad—all expenses paid—to 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 I’m 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 Kremlin—and 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 Yeltsin’s 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 country’s mobsters and oligarchs, allowing them to operate freely as long as they strengthen Putin’s 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 wasn’t 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, Mogilevich’s 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 Kremlin’s 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.

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https://newrepublic.com/article/143586/trumps-russian-laundromat-trump-tower-luxury-high-rises-dirty-money-international-crime-syndicate