The Deal That Rescued Jared Kushner's 666 Fifth Avenue Has a Qatar Problem -- Kait Justice

[erronis]

https://kaitjustice.substack.com/p/the-deal-that-rescued-jared-kushners

What Congress and Epstein's files reveal about the network behind the rescue and the same players now shaping Gaza reconstruction

Another deep dive by Kait Justice. I wish I had the mental and financial acumen to follow all of this.

Five days ago, Richard Kahn sat for his deposition before the House Oversight Committee. He is the accountant who managed Jeffrey Epstein's finances for over a decade and who tracked Marc Rowan's stock trades that we saw he sent the data about to Epstein, and who forwarded a New York Times article about Apollo co-founder Josh Harris meeting Jared Kushner at the White House before Apollo lent the Kushner family business $184 million, with the note "not great for Josh or APO."

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If you have not read Part 1, go read it. Everything here builds on what I showed you about the Farkas fee, the shadow bank, and how Apollo sits at the institutional center of that operation.

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To understand what I mean, you need to know what happened to the lending market after 2008 and why the mezzanine position Apollo held over the Kushners was so powerful. Previously I explained that mezzanine debt gives the lender a claim on the company that owns the building rather than the building itself, and that a mezzanine lender can seize ownership quickly and quietly if the borrower cannot pay. Here is what I did not have room to explain: after the 2008 financial crisis, the market conditions that made mezzanine lenders powerful got dramatically worse for borrowers.

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What Qatar Said No To

In 2015 and 2016, Kushner Companies approached Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassim Bin Jaber al-Thani, known as HBJ. He is the former head of Qatar's sovereign wealth fund, which is essentially the investment account where the government of Qatar parks the hundreds of billions of dollars it earns from natural gas.

The Kushners asked for $500 million to rescue the building from its crushing debt. That deal fell through in early 2017, right as Jared Kushner was settling into his role as Senior Advisor to the President.

In June 2017, the United States backed a Saudi-led blockade of Qatar. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was reportedly blindsided. The Intercept reported that the anti-Qatar tweets came from the UAE Ambassador and were delivered to the President by Kushner himself, whose family owed $1.4 billion more on the building than it was worth, the same building Qatar had just refused to rescue.

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Qatar refused to bail out 666 Fifth Avenue voluntarily. The United States then backed a blockade of Qatar, reportedly orchestrated by the man whose family needed the money. Qatar's sovereign wealth fund then appeared as the second-largest investor in the deal that rescued the building, layered through enough intermediaries that everyone could claim they were not involved. I do not have a document proving those three facts are connected by intent rather than coincidence, but I keep asking myself what would have to be true for all three to happen in that order and not be connected. I cannot come up with an answer that makes sense.

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[hookaleft]

1. omg the corruption is just unbelievable

[multigraincracker]

2. Not easy, but always follow the money.