How to get on the right side of Donald Trump? With the erratic businessman-politician due back in the Oval Office in two months’ time, it’s the question governments all around the world are desperate to solve. Might throwing in a Trump hotel or high-rise grease the bigger deal? It’s been tried before…

New ventures in the Gulf
Even in the short time since Trump’s return to office was confirmed at the ballot box, the latest on new business ventures backed by the American president-elect in the Middle East has been popping up in the headlines.

Trump has appointed golfing buddy and real estate developer Steve Witkoff to be his Middle East Envoy (Credit: US Government employee, public domain).

The idea of Iran ever using a downtown Tehran property deal with Trump to get him off its case at this point seems rather far-fetched—though the November 13 announcement that Trump has appointed his golfing buddy and real estate developer Steve Witkoff to be his special envoy to the Middle East might give Tehran some food for thought on that score. Across the other side of the Persian Gulf, however, there’s plenty of commercial action involving Trump enterprises.

In July, The Trump Organization announced a partnership with Dar Global, the international arm of Saudi real estate developer Dar Al Arkan, to build a high-rise luxury tower in Dubai. The development includes branded residential units and a Trump hotel. It will capitalise on strong demand for luxury branded real estate in the Gulf.

Earlier in July, The Trump Organization said that, in another collaboration with Dar Global, it would construct a Trump Tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

"We are excited to expand our presence in the Middle East," Eric Trump, the second son of Donald Trump, and executive vice president of The Trump Organization, said in a statement.

In 2022, Trump’s company partnered with Dar Al Arkan to create a luxury resort and golf complex in Oman’s capital Muscat (an aside: South Korea’s president is said to be practising his golf swing ahead of a hoped-for encounter with Trump).

The AIDA project includes a Trump-branded hotel, villas, and an 18-hole golf course overlooking the Gulf of Oman. The Omani government, heavily invested in the infrastructure, provided land for the project. Concerns over labour practices were subsequently raised, with migrant workers reportedly facing challenging conditions and low pay.​

Deals in the shadows of Trump Towers Istanbul
Istanbul’s links with Trump the businessman go way back and with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on terms with both Trump and his incoming government “efficiency czar” Elon Musk, the “art of the deal” is not lost on the Turkish leader of three decades.

Mehmet Ali Yalcindag with Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump at the Trump Towers Istanbul opening 12 years ago (Credit: The Trump Organization).

Trump Towers Istanbul was opened in 2012. Trump and his daughter Ivanka visited the investment following the inauguration ceremony.

The complex boasts two towers, a 39-storey residential tower and a 37-storey office tower, as well as a shopping mall.

It was in 2008 that Trump inked the licensing agreement with Mehmet Ali Yalcindag, a son-in-law to the Dogan family that owns Dogan Holding (DOHOL).

In 2016, Yalcindag attended Trump’s presidential inauguration. He went on to become one of a trio of US and Turkish sons-in-law that turned into power brokers. The New York Times described Yalcindag as a go-between for then Turkish finance minister and son-in-law of Erdogan, Berat Albayrak, and Jared Kushner, the real estate investor, husband to Ivanka Trump, who became a senior White House aide to her father.

Media reports suggested Trump praised his “close friend” Yalcindag during phone calls with Erdogan.

In 2018, Yalcindag was appointed to head the Turkish-US Business Council (TAIK). Predecessor Ekim Alptekin was indicted by federal US prosecutors for his role in hiring Trump's first national security advisor, retired general Mike Flynn.

Trump's relationship with Erdogan has often raised eyebrows. For instance, Trump blocked sanctions requested by Congress over Turkey's purchase of S-400 missile defence systems from the Kremlin.

In 2019, Trump moved US forces out of the way when Erdogan sent Turkish forces into northeast Syria to attack Kurdish militia who allied with Washington in the fight against Islamic State. Trump's first defence secretary James Mattis called the move “felony stupid” in Bob Woodward's book “Rage”.

In September 2020, Trump tax records published by The New York Times showed that he had collected $13mn in licensing fees from Trump Towers since 2008. He had previously claimed to have collected only $1mn since 2016.

Also in 2020, Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton urged the House impeachment inquiry into Trump to look at how as president he had allegedly intervened in New York prosecutors’ investigations into Turkey’s Halkbank (HALKB) in order to curry favour with Erdogan.

Reza Zarrab, who turned state’s witness in the US in the Halkbank case after pleading guilty to taking part in an Iran sanctions-busting scheme, had an office at Trump Towers. Trump’s then personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, acted as an unregistered lobbyist for Zarrab in the US during the court process.

Luxury hotel designed for Belgrade site bombed by Nato
In the spring, it was revealed that Affinity Partners, an investment firm linked to US president-elect Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, plans to build a luxury hotel complex in Belgrade to replace the derelict Yugoslav General Staff headquarters, bombed by Nato in 1999. Kushner presented the project to Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic in June.

Richard Grenell, US envoy for the Serbia/Kosovo conflict during the first Trump administration, reportedly liaised between Kushner and the Serbian authorities. 

Affinity also plans to develop a luxury resort on Sazan Island, a former Cold War military base and protected marine park in Albania.

US Senate Finance Committee chair senator Ron Wyden has warned that the luxury developments planned in Serbia and Albania would give the governments of the two Western Balkan countries leverage over Trump family members. 

The committee revealed in September that Serbian and Albanian government officials proactively approached Affinity Partners with proposals for real estate projects in their respective countries. The finding was part of an ongoing investigation into the firm's foreign investments.

Wyden said in a letter to senators that the “prospective real estate deals give Albanian and Serbian governments leverage over [the] Trump family”. 

Specifically, Wyden points out that the respective governments will control permitting, local taxation and licences required for the projects to go ahead, while they also appear to own the land where the two projects will be developed. This situation would allow the Serbian and Albanian governments to “extract unusual concessions” from Affinity in the process.

Affinity’s planned redevelopment of the former Yugoslav military HQ in Belgrade is particularly controversial. 

The site, designed by renowned Serbian architect Nikola Dobrovic, has been kept as a memorial to the bombings related to the Kosovo war, and is seen by many Serbians as a symbol of Nato aggression. 

In correspondence with the Senate committee, Affinity confirmed that the Belgrade project would include a museum dedicated to the "victims of Nato aggression", a proposal that Wyden sharply criticised. 

“It is wholly inappropriate for any foreign government to require an American firm to participate in that kind of anti-American historical revisionism, an act that whitewashes ethnic cleansing and genocide and falsely recasts Nato as an antagonist, and it is egregious that a firm founded and owned by family of a former and potential future President of the United States would agree to it,” wrote Wyden in a letter published by the Senate committee. 

Within Serbia, over 22,000 people have signed a petition calling for the bombed General Staff building in central Belgrade to be preserved, with more than 10,000 people signing up in the first 24 hours. “The construction of a hotel on the site of this building is illegal and represents the destruction of dignity,” said the Kreni-Promeni (Go-Change) movement when it announced the petition. 

After Affinity Partners' plans in the Western Balkans were revealed, several other businessmen linked to Trump also expressed interest in the region. 

North Macedonia's President Gordana Davkova seen in June hosting a visiting delegation of American business executives associated with Trump (Credit: Pretsedatel.mk).

In June, North Macedonia's President Gordana Siljanovska Davkova received a delegation of executives from the Trump Media & Technology Group and other business figures associated with Trump.

In September, Serbian media reported that Trump’s eldest son Donald Trump Jr, who is executive vice president of The Trump Organization, had made an unexpected visit to Belgrade where he hosted a private dinner with a select group of prominent Serbian business figures, including owners of construction companies and banks. 

“Donald Trump’s Worst Deal”
Back in March 2017, The New Yorker told the story of what it headlined as “Donald Trump’s Worst Deal”.

To great astonishment at the time (reactions to Trump’s misdeeds nowadays, of course, frequently involve a shrug of the shoulders, people the world over having grown accustomed to Trump getting away scot-free over the years), the publication related how Trump appeared to have helped build a hotel in Azerbaijani capital Baku that seemed to result from a corrupt operation engineered by oligarchs tied to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC—the elite ideologically-driven branch of Iran’s armed forces that Trump, in late 2017, instructed US Treasury officials to designate as “terrorist”.

As things turned out the 33-storey-high five-star hotel and residence Trump International Hotel & Tower Baku never opened, though in 2012, The Trump Organization signed multiple contracts with the Azerbaijani developers behind the project with plans to deliver an “ultra-luxury property.”

If Trump had gone ahead with the hotel and residential tower deal in Baku, he might have found himself sharing the same profit stream as Iran's Revolutionary Guard, designated "terrorist" by Washington (Credit: Matti Blume, cc-by-sa 4.0).

The developers were close relatives of the now 72-year-old Ziya Mammadov, one of Azerbaijan's wealthiest and most powerful oligarchs, who served as transportation minister. In a series of cables, sent from the US Embassy in Baku in 2009 and 2010, and revealed by WikiLeaks, a US diplomat described Mammadov as “notoriously corrupt even for Azerbaijan”.

However, The Trump Organization’s chief legal officer, Alan Garten, insisted that the Baku hotel project sparked no ethical issues for Trump, because his company had never engaged directly with Mammadov and was “merely a licensor” that gave rights to use his famous name to a company headed by Ziya Mammadov’s son, Anar.  

A month after Trump was elected president in 2016, Garten announced that The Trump Organization had cut its ties with the hotel project.

Whatever the true extent of The Trump Organization’s involvement with the hotel investment—The New Yorker exhaustively explained how it amounted to rather more than just a licensing arrangement and how The Trump Organization could be vulnerable to US prosecution under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) if it was found that there was insufficient due diligence performed on the project partners—the Mammadov family’s financial entanglement with an Iranian family tied to the IRGC, the military force that plays a huge role as a stakeholder in Iran’s construction industry, was problematic.

Garten argued that the FCPA did not apply to The Trump Organization’s role in the Baku project as it had no equity ownership stake, but Jessica Tillipman, an assistant dean at George Washington University Law School and FCPA specialist, was cited as responding: “No, that’s just wrong. You can’t go into business deals in Azerbaijan assuming that you are immune from the FCPA. Nor can you escape liability by looking the other way. The entire Baku deal is a giant red flag—the direct involvement of foreign government officials and their relatives in Azerbaijan with ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Corruption warning signs are rarely more obvious.”

The Baku deal appears to have been the second time that The Trump Organization had become involved in a business transaction that was vulnerable to US efforts to sanction Iran. In 1998, when Trump purchased the General Motors Building, in Manhattan, an Iranian tenant, Bank Melli, came with it.

The following year, the Treasury Department listed Bank Melli as “owned or controlled” by the government of Iran, meaning it was covered by US sanctions. It later even described Bank Melli as a primary financial institution via which Iran was routing money to finance terrorism and develop weapons of mass destruction. The Trump Organization, however, stuck with Bank Melli as a tenant for four more years before ending the lease.