Trump self-dealing all over the world

Mr. Trump’s name is plastered on signs at the entrance of the project and in the lobby of the InterContinental Hotel in Muscat, the nearby capital of Oman, where a team of sales agents is invoking Mr. Trump’s name to help sell luxury villas at prices of up to $13 million, mostly targeting superrich buyers from around the world, including from Russia, Iran and India.

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Interviews and an examination by The New York Times of hundreds of pages of financial documents associated with the Oman project show that this partnership is unlike any other international deal Mr. Trump and his family have signed.

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Mr. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, has already brought in at least $5 million from the Oman deal. Under its terms, Trump Organization will not put up any money for the development, but will help design a Trump-branded hotel, golf course and golf club and will be paid to manage them for up to 30 years, among other revenue.

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The Trump family, the agreement says, will not have to commit its own money to the project, but it will have detailed oversight.

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The deal puts the Trump company in charge of the hotel budget, its restaurants and any retail stores. The Trump Organization will set prices and market the hotel once it opens under the name Trump International Hotel Oman.

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It will have similar management rights over the 18-hole golf course and golf club, which will be known as Trump International Golf Club Oman. There will also be over 200 “Trump branded residential villas.”

  NYT

Better get that nailed down, because after Tish James gets through with them, there might not be a Trump Organization.

More than 1,000 migrant laborers are busy in the searing heat building the first phase of the Oman government’s Yiti project. Next door, at the Aida site, where the Trump-branded phase of the project will eventually rise, work on the roads is just beginning.

The army of workers, in orange, blue or yellow overalls, move deliberately, many of them with their heads covered with towels and other fabrics stuffed under their hard hats to try to protect themselves from the heat, routinely above 100 degrees, during 10-hour shifts. They live mostly in trailer camps adjacent to the construction site, or they arrive in fleets of buses that run through the billowing clouds of dust that blow through.

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The workers are being paid as little as $340 a month, according to one of the engineers who is supervising the work.

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[L]ast year, the State Department listed “labor exploitation of foreign migrants” as among the human rights issues it is monitoring in Oman.

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“It’s too hot — too hot,” said Mathan Mp, 38, who is from Tamil Nadu, the southernmost state of India, said as he took a break from supervising dozens of workers at the project site. “But we came for work. We have a time schedule. We have to finish the project.”

Omani officials said they would closely monitor working conditions for the laborers, adding that during the hottest weeks of the summer the workers would not be at the site in the middle of the day.

Unless they get behind schedule, right?

During his presidency, Mr. Trump’s family business profited directly from money spent at his Washington hotel by foreign governments including Saudi Arabia, just one example of what ethics experts cited as real or perceived conflicts of interest during his administration. His stake in the project in Oman as he runs for president again only focuses more attention on whether and how his own financial interests could influence foreign policy were he to return to the White House.

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Neither Dar Al Arkan nor the Trump Organization would say how much the Trump family would be paid. In previous international deals, the family has traditionally taken a fee in exchange for the use of its name, a separate fee to manage the hotel and golf properties, and a percentage of the profits on the sale of Trump-branded villas, if the prices hit a goal.

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DarGlobal is teaming up with luxury brands like Missoni, Versace and Lamborghini — as well as the Trump family — on projects outside Saudi Arabia targeting international buyers. DarGlobal is targeting buyers who will pay as much as a 30 percent premium for a “branded” townhouse and can often buy their units with cash, according to a confidential company document obtained by The Times.

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The Trump-branded project is being built just above the seaside village of Yiti, where there are now more donkeys, goats and stray cats in the streets than people, as many have moved away as the construction projects have accelerated.

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Htim Talbi, whose family has lived in Yiti for six decades and remains in one of the few occupied homes in the dusty town, said he harbored a far-off dream that he might somehow afford one of the luxury townhouses.

“Trump — he is your king from America,” Mr. Talbi said, after inviting a visitor to his village inside to an air-conditioned room to sit on the floor and share a pot of tea.

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[Ziad El Chaar, DarGlobal’s chief executive,] worked with the Trump family in Dubai, building a Trump International Golf Club. Pleased with that project, he asked the Trump family to join him in Oman, in what will be DarGlobal’s largest international project, worth an estimated $4 billion.

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“There is a big wealth concentration in the world, which means that those people will more and more demand more exclusive products and more exclusive projects.”

And the Trumps will be there to cash in wherever there's demand, while uncounted numbers live at the edge of starvation.  And America's foreign policy will follow Trump's interest if he's president, just like before, only moreso when he realizes he can indeed do anything he wants.

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