The Trump Ocean club in Panama has obvious ties to organized crime and drug trafficking, according to an NBC News and Reuters joint investigation. The Trump Organization, of course, says it was at arm’s length from the development and so bears no responsibility.
The Reuter’s report says not so fast:
Still, some legal experts say the episode raises questions about the steps Trump took to check the source of any income from there. Arthur Middlemiss, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan and a former head of JPMorgan’s global anti-corruption program, said that since Panama was “perceived to be highly corrupt,” anyone engaged in business there should conduct due diligence on others involved in their ventures. If they did not, he said, there was a potential risk in U.S. law of being liable for turning a blind eye to wrongdoing.
Reuter’s also makes Ivanka Trump the face of this criminality: it says she was responsible for singling out a Brazilian car salesman named Alexandre Ventura Nogueira as a man of promise who became a leading broker for the development and he appeared in a video with her promoting the project. Nogueira was responsible for between one-third and one-half of advance sales for the project. Reuter’s connects him to a Colombian who was later convicted of money laundering and is now in detention in the United States; a Russian investor in the Trump project who was jailed in Israel in the 1990s for kidnap and threats to kill; and a Ukrainian investor who was arrested for alleged people-smuggling while working with Nogueira and later convicted by a Kiev court.