It's the whole damned family

[In the spring of 2007] Alexandre Ventura Nogueira, [who owned Homes Real Estate Investment & Services, offered] a chance to invest in Trump’s latest project – a 70-floor tower called the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower [in Panama City].

[...]

In an interview with Reuters, Nogueira said he met and spoke with Ivanka [Trump] “many times” when she was handling the Trump Organization’s involvement in the Panama development. “She would remember me,” he said.

Ivanka was so taken with his sales skills, Nogueira said, that she helped him become a leading broker for the development and he appeared in a video with her promoting the project.

[...]

Nogueira was responsible for between one-third and one-half of advance sales for the project. [He also] did business with a Colombian who was later convicted of money laundering and is now in detention in the United States; a Russian investor in the Trump project who was jailed in Israel in the 1990s for kidnap and threats to kill; and a Ukrainian investor who was arrested for alleged people-smuggling while working with Nogueira and later convicted by a Kiev court.

[...]

Three years after getting involved in the Trump Ocean Club, Nogueira was arrested by Panamanian authorities on charges of fraud and forgery, unrelated to the Trump project. Released on $1.4 million bail, he later fled the country.

[...]

Nogueira, 43, denies the charges.A White House spokesman referred questions to the Trump Organization.

[...]

Alan Garten, the organization’s chief legal officer, said: “No one at the Trump Organization, including the Trump family, has any recollection of ever meeting or speaking with this individual.”

  Reuters

Maybe these pictures will job their memories. It worked for George Papadopolous.

Arthur Middlemiss, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan and a former head of JPMorgan’s global anti-corruption program, said that since Panama was “perceived to be highly corrupt,” anyone engaged in business there should conduct due diligence on others involved in their ventures. If they did not, he said, there was a potential risk in U.S. law of being liable for turning a blind eye to wrongdoing.

[...]

The White House referred Reuters questions about the Ocean Club development to the Trump Organization. Garten said the Trump Organization’s role in the project “was at all times limited to licensing its brand and providing management services. As the company was not the owner or developer, it had no involvement in the sale of any units at the property.”

[...]

[Nogueira] said he only learned after the Ocean Club project was almost complete that some of his partners and investors in the Trump project were criminals, including some with what he described as connections to the “Russian mafia.”

There's those Russian mobsters again. Funny how they seem to turn up at so many Trump properties.

He said he had not knowingly laundered any illicit money through the Trump project, although he did say he had laundered cash later in other schemes for corrupt Panamanian officials.

"Not knowingly."

It was not his job to check the source of money that investors used to buy units in the Trump Ocean Club, Nogueira said. “I didn’t know the money was coming from anything illegal. As long as they were doing wire transfers and not cash, I wasn’t worried about the source of it.”

[...]

Nobody asked me: ‘Who are the customers? Where did the money come from?’”

That's more like it.

Donald Trump’s involvement in the Ocean Club began in 2005, when local developer Roger Khafif travelled to Trump Tower in New York to pitch the idea of a Trump project in Panama.

[...]

In an interview with Reuters, Khafif recalled that Trump wanted to use the Panama project as a “baby” for his daughter Ivanka, who had just joined the Trump Organization, to gain experience in the property business.

Aka how to launder money through real estate developments.

In September 2005, in an official notice posted on the internet, the Spanish economy ministry said it had opened proceedings to fine Nogueira for an alleged “serious violation” of the country’s money-laundering laws. The proceedings were terminated about nine months later after officials could not determine Nogueira’s whereabouts.

[...]

Once in Panama, [...] Nogueira said that in the months that followed he discussed promotion and sales with Ivanka in Panama, Miami and New York. He said he also joined a group that travelled with Ivanka on a private chartered jet to look at a potential site for another Trump project in Cartagena, Colombia.

Panaman, Colombia - countries notorious for corruption and dirty money.

While Donald Trump was not the owner of the Panama project, the Trump Organization participated in many details down to “choosing the furniture and fittings,” said Nogueira. Day-to-day the project was assigned to Ivanka, he said, adding: “I spoke to her a lot of times, a lot of times.” He also met Donald Jr. and Eric Trump.

[...]

Garten, the Trump Organization’s counsel, described contact between Nogueira and the Trumps as “meaningless.” He said such meetings and events “may have been memorable” for Nogueira, but for Ivanka and the rest of the Trump family it would have been “just one of literally hundreds of public appearances they were asked to make that year.”

[...]

Nogueira said that one [promotional] video was commissioned by him. Ivanka helped arrange access to Trump Tower in New York for some sequences. “In this video we made, I was talking and she was talking.”

[...]

Khafif, president and co-owner of the developer, Newland, said he was unsure of the exact number, but Nogueira had probably sold up to 300 units. “Everybody was lining up to work with him ... During those days he was the hottest real estate agency in town,” he said.

[...]

In 2006 and 2007, Panama corporate records show, at least 131 holding companies with various combinations of the words “Trump” and “Ocean” in their name – for example, the Trump Ocean 1806 Investment Corp - were registered in Panama for pre-sales deals, and mostly by the Homes group.

In many cases the identity of the buyers was not clear.

Imagine that.

Roniel Ortiz, a former lawyer for both Nogueira and [Colombian businessman named David Murcia Guzman], said Nogueira had offered to wash Murcia’s [drug] money by buying apartments on his behalf.

[...]

In 2013 Nogueira, in conversations secretly recorded by a former business partner, said he had performed money laundering as a service, moving tens of millions of dollars mainly through contacts in Miami and the Bahamas.

[...]

Nogueira said Murcia gave him $1 million to invest in Panamanian property, which Nogueira used to pay the deposit on up to ten Trump apartments among other investments.

[...]

Speaking to Reuters, Nogueira said he could not recall making such claims and denied laundering cash through the Trump project or handling drugs money.

I wonder if anyone would like to do a study as to seeming ubiquitous memory loss related to illegal deals. The Trump administration could provide test subjects.

So, back to the story. An event was held at Mar-A-Lago in 2007 bringing potential clients for the Panamanian building.

[T]he guests got to meet and greet Trump and his children, Donald Jr., Eric and Ivanka. The event was organized to celebrate a successful sales campaign – and to solicit more sales.

[...]

[I]n the delegation from Homes [...] was Alexander Altshoul, born in Belarus.

[...]

He became involved in Homes after [...] investing with family and friends in the Trump project, paying deposits on 10 apartments and one hotel unit.

Among his partners in that investment, according to Altshoul and Panamanian corporate records, was a Muscovite named Arkady Vodovosov, a relative of Altshoul. In 1998, Vodovosov was sentenced to five years in prison in Israel for kidnap and threats to kill and torture, court records state.

The cast of seedy characters keeps growing. There's another Russian-linked member of Homes at that time who was in the Mar-A-Lago meeting, named Stanislau Kavalenka.

Kavalenka’s whereabouts are unknown.

[...]

Kavalenka told [Nogueira when he brought him into the Homes company]: “I was running some girls. That’s how I made money. But I was cleared.”

[...]

A bond prospectus was issued in November 2007, enabling the raising of construction funds. By the end of June that year, the prospectus declared, the project had “pre-sold approximately 64 percent of the building’s condominium and commercial units,” guaranteeing receipts on completion of the project of at least $278.7 million.

[...]

But not all the money collected in the pre-sales campaign would go on to fund the project.

[...]

Nogueira either failed to pass on all the deposits he collected to the project’s developers, or sometimes sold the same apartment to more than one client.

[...]

“When the building was completed and people arrived to seek out their apartments, they ran into each other - two, three people who were fighting for the same apartment.”

[...]

Nogueira said double-sales occurred because of changes in the building specifications or clerical error. He said he never deliberately sold an apartment twice.

[...]

Released on bail for $1.4 million, he continued to live in Panama until 2012 when, despite a ban on leaving the country, he fled to his native country, Brazil, before moving on again. Karen Kahn, a federal prosecutor based in Sao Paulo, said Nogueira is under a federal investigation for international money laundering.

[...]

Nogueira agreed to meet Reuters and NBC News on November 13 at a neutral location, on condition it would not be revealed. Nogueira said an arrest warrant was outstanding against him in Panama.

[...]

By the time the Trump Ocean Club project was complete in 2011, many investors had withdrawn and lost their deposits rather than stump up the 70 percent balance. Bond holders lost, too, after Khafif’s company, Newland, defaulted on payments and the bond was restructured.

There was one person who still profited: Donald Trump.

[...]

Court records from Newland’s bankruptcy in 2013 indicate Trump agreed to reduce his fee, but that he still earned between $30 million and $50 million from lending his name to the project.

And, according to Nogueira [interviewed by Lester Holt, which I can't find], is still earning money from it.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.