Steve Witkoff, an American real estate investor chosen as US President-elect Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, appeared alongside Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday. Witkoff is in business with the Trump family through a new crypto company. Photo / The New York Times
Steve Witkoff, an American real estate investor chosen as US President-elect Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, appeared alongside Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday. Witkoff is in business with the Trump family through a new crypto company. Photo / The New York Times
US President-elect Donald Trump’s business interests are increasingly intertwined with his governance plans, raising conflict concerns.
Damac plans to invest $20 billion in the US with Trump’s assistance, benefiting from expedited reviews.
Jared Kushner has raised $1.5b from Middle East investors for his private equity company.
US President-elect Donald Trump was at the lectern talking through the approaching inauguration of his second term. But across the ballroom at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida was a display of the extraordinary way his family business interests are now fully mixed with his plans forgovernance of the United States.
Trump opened the unusual news conference on Tuesday by introducing Hussain Sajwani, founder and chairman of Damac Properties, a Dubai, United Arab Emirates-based real estate firm that partnered with the Trump family a decade ago to build the first Trump-branded golf course in the Middle East.
Now, Trump said, Damac is planning to invest billions of dollars in the United States to build data centers, with the help of Trump and the federal government, even while Damac continues its role as a Trump business partner.
There too in the room at Mar-a-Lago was Steve Witkoff, who is in business with a new crypto company called World Liberty Financial that Trump and his sons helped start.
Witkoff, while still working with the crypto company, is serving as Trump’s Middle East envoy, and Witkoff provided an update from the stage on efforts to release Israeli hostages held in the Gaza Strip.
Trump pointed out one of his sons, Eric Trump, who has been pushing new Trump tower deals in the Middle East, was in the back of the ballroom as well, on the same day LIV Golf, the Saudi-financed golf league, disclosed it intends to host another tournament this year at the Trump National Doral resort near Miami.
This means money tied to the Saudi government will continue to flow to the Trump family, even when Trump is back in the White House, as LIV Golf is owned by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.
Golfers at a LIV tournament at the Trump National Doral resort in Doral, Florida last year. The Saudi-backed golf league said on Tuesday it would return to the Doral resort in April, in a sign Trump family deals using Saudi government financing will continue. Photo / The New York Times
Also Tuesday, Trump Organisation’s other major Middle East business partner, Dar Al Arkan, disclosed it planned to start building projects in the United States for the first time, according to a report by Reuters. Dar Al Arkan did not respond to a request for comment.
It all comes as Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, recently disclosed he has raised an additional $1.5b from Middle East investors for his private equity company. The firm he started after he left his position in the White House in 2020 now has more than $4.5b, mostly from oil-rich sovereign wealth funds.
“This will be the golden age of America – this is the golden age of America,” Trump said, as he was wrapping up his more than hour-long news conference, not referring to his own family business operations, but his confidence in the future path of the nation. “We’re going to have a great country again.”
The scale of overlap between Trump’s family members and their business interests, and the government he will lead, all showcased on the same day, underscores how unprecedented the second Trump presidency and the potential for conflicts of interest will be.
“There was at least some concern from the Trump administration during the first term about the optics of financial intermingling between Trump’s businesses and the government,” said Adav Noti, executive director of Campaign Legal Center, a non-profit ethics group. “What we are seeing with the incoming administration is no longer that kind of concern about those optics. There is an impression that the handcuffs are off.”
Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump, rejected the criticism.
“President Trump’s family members are highly respected, intelligent individuals who love our country,” she said in a statement. “They have always played an integral role in ... Trump’s campaigns and his first administration and have made many personal sacrifices to help their father make America great again.”
Leavitt also pointed to Hunter Biden, the son of incumbent US President Joe Biden, who secured millions of dollars worth of contracts while his father was vice-president from overseas business executives.
The Trump family has made clear since the election it does not intend to forswear new international deals as it did in 2017, meaning it will continue to announce new ventures in spots around the world, Eric Trump said in an interview with the New York Times last month.
The family still plans to announce an ethics plan that will include hiring an outside legal adviser which will review these deals, in an attempt to avoid special treatment by companies that may be seeking favors from the US government. It also has said it will not be doing new deals directly with foreign governments while Trump is president.
But the list of new deals has accelerated in recent months as Trump is poised to take office.
Dar Al Arkan, a Saudi-based real estate company, disclosed since the middle of last year that it will build new Trump-named towers in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and in Dubai, in addition to a previously planned project in Oman. Dar Al Arkan and its Dar Global subsidiary are private companies, but they have close ties to the Saudi government.
Kushner, in a podcast last month, disclosed for the first time that he had received $1.5b worth of new funding from the sovereign wealth funds of Qatar and of Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. He said he also had a commitment from Saudi Arabia, which had previously agreed to deliver his firm $2b, to extend their agreement to 2029, two years later than the original date.
Kushner, in the interview, said this move means he avoided conflicts of interest, as he said he had negotiated these new commitments before his father-in-law was re-elected.
“I made very clear to them that in the event that Trump was elected, they should not expect anything from me for that,” Kushner said during the interview with podcaster Patrick O’Shaughnessy.
Kushner and his firm declined on Tuesday to comment on the record about the matter. To date, Affinity Partners, his company, has invested about $2b of its funds into firms, including about $129 million into Phoenix Holdings, an Israeli financial services company that has seen its stock value surge since the investment by Affinity.
The plan Trump announced on Tuesday while at Mar-a-Lago centered around Damac, which he said intended to invest $20b in the United States “over a very short period of time”. The investment apparently focused on data centres that are needed to handle fast-growing demands coming from cloud computing and artificial intelligence industries.
“We’re very, very excited now with his leadership and his open strategy and policy to encourage businesses to come to the US,” Sajwani said after Trump invited him to the stage at the start of his news conference. “For the last four years, we’ve been waiting for this moment.”
Damac and the Trump Organisation are in business together in Dubai with an initial golf course and have plans to build a second, although this project has long been delayed. But in the US, Trump said, he intends to use the federal government’s powers to help his family business partner by offering Damac “expedited reviews” of any federal environmental questions that might emerge related to the company’s plans.
“We’re going to move them quickly through the environmental process,” Trump said, adding that a similar benefit would be offered to any company planning to invest $1b in the United States, although Damac is the first to get such a promise.
A diorama of the Trump International Golf Club Oman, a planned development in partnership between the Trump Organisation and Dar Global, a Saudi luxury real estate developer, in Muscat, Oman, in 2023. Photo / The New York Times
Because Trump is so close to his children, moves they make attract attention regardless of whether there is a component related to the Trump Organisation.
For instance, three of Trump’s incoming government officials posted photos to social media of themselves traveling with Donald Trump Jr, a key political voice with regard to his father, to Greenland, which the president-elect has said he wants the US government to acquire for strategic purposes. Donald Trump Jr is not joining his father’s government, and did not appear to have held any meetings related to any kind of development.
But the LIV Golf announcement on Tuesday means the Saudi-financed tournament will be back at Trump’s Doral resort in April, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars at the venue.
The event also drives thousands of ticket-buying fans to the resort, filling up hotel restaurants and guest rooms during the multi-day event. LIV events also boost the international profile of the more than a dozen Trump family golf resorts around the world.
“What they’re doing with LIV is very important,” Trump told the Times at the 2022 competition at Doral, which as of this year will have been used four times by LIV Golf for tournaments. “They’re putting a lot of effort into it and a lot of money into it, as you see.”
Written by: Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman and Alan Blinder.
