The Undignified Fall Of Trump's Toronto Tower

[DonViejo]

By SAM THIELMAN Published AUGUST 15, 2017 11:46 AM

There are just two real estate developments connected to President Donald Trump that special counsel Robert Mueller has showed a reported interest in so far: there’s the Trump SoHo, of course, subject of pages upon pages of dirt-digging, but there’s also the failed Trump International Hotel and Tower, a boondoggle every bit as embarrassing as the SoHo disaster. The developers of the Toronto project, which was just a licensing deal for Trump, hold close connections to oligarchs in the former Soviet bloc, and the project’s sales structure was a mirror image of the Trump SoHo’s—as are its legal troubles.

What makes the 67-story tower interesting to Mueller, as the Wall Street Journal has reported, is the link between the project and Vnesheconombank, or VEB, the state-owned Russian bank on whose board Vladimir Putin himself sat, and that has been under U.S. sanctions since 2014. And the link between that bank and the Toronto project is Alexander Shnaider, a 49-year-old billionaire commodities trader whose career was initially spent buying “erstwhile state assets in the republics and satellites of the Soviet Union,” to quote a Globe and Mail profile from the year after the Trump Toronto was announced.

Born in what was then Leningrad but raised in Israel and Toronto, Shnaider went to work in the 1990’s for his then-father-in-law, Lithuanian trader Boris Birshtein, one of the first major moneymen to emerge from the wreckage of the USSR. Shnaider, whose worth Forbes pegs at $2.85 billion, abhorred the spotlight at the time, telling Forbes in 2005, “I don’t know if I am ready for all this attention.” By the time the Trump-branded hotel finally opened in 2012 however—two years behind schedule—Shnaider was happy to appear at the ribbon-cutting.

Symon Zucker, Shnaider’s attorney, told TPM that his client has not been contacted by federal investigators looking into some of Trump’s business deals as part of their probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

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http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/trump-toronto-tower-unraveling-alexander-schnaider

[Wounded Bear]

1. K & R ......for visibility..

Follow the money. Always follow the money.

[wasupaloopa]

2. I was in Toronto two weeks ago and was struck by all the 20 somethings that live in high rise

apartment buildings down by the harbor. We rented one through Airbnb.

I did some research on their life style and learned that they barely make enough to pay rent and cover other living expenses.
They do not own cars and use public transportation to go to work and to social events.

One problem for them is the lack of affordable rentals. And part of that problem is that investors buy up a large numbers of apartments in a high rise and do not rent them. They just park money there.

I noticed at night many of the apartments in the high rise towers had no lights on. They were most likely vacant.