[Situations like these are already leading some former government officials from both parties to ask if America’s reaction to events around the world could potentially be shaded, if only slightly, by the Trump family’s financial ties with foreign players. They worry, too, that in some countries those connections could compromise American efforts to criticize the corrupt intermingling of state power with vast business enterprises controlled by the political elite.]
By
Richard C. Paddock, Eric Lipton, Ellen Barry, Rod Nordland, Danny Hakim and
Simon Romero
 |
|
Trump Tower in the Makati
City district of Manila is being developed by Donald J. Trump’s business partner Jose
E.B. Antonio,
who has just been named the Philippines’ special trade envoy to the United
States. Credit Hannah Reyes Morales
for The New York Times |
MANILA
— On Thanksgiving Day, a
Philippine developer named Jose E. B. Antonio hosted a company anniversary bash
at one of Manila’s poshest hotels. He had much to be thankful for.
In October, he had quietly been named a
special envoy to the United States by the Philippine president, Rodrigo
Duterte. Mr. Antonio was nearly finished building a $150 million tower in
Manila’s financial district — a 57-story symbol of affluence and capitalism,
which bluntly promotes itself with the slogan “Live Above the Rest.” And now
his partner on the project, Donald J. Trump, had just been elected president of
the United States.
After the election, Mr. Antonio flew to New
York for a private meeting at Trump Tower with the president-elect’s children,
who have been involved in the Manila project from the beginning, as have Mr.
Antonio’s children. The Trumps and Antonios have other ventures in the works,
including Trump-branded resorts in the Philippines, Mr. Antonio’s son Robbie
Antonio said.
“We will continue to give you products that
you can enjoy and be proud of,” the elder Mr. Antonio, one of the richest men
in the Philippines, told the 500 friends, employees and customers gathered for
his star-studded celebration in Manila.
Mr. Antonio’s combination of jobs — he is a
business partner with Mr. Trump, while also representing the Philippines in its
relationship with the United States and the president-elect — is hardly
inconsequential, given some of the weighty issues on the diplomatic table.
Among them, Mr. Duterte has urged “a
separation” from the United States and has called for American troops to exit
the country in two years’ time. His antidrug crusade has resulted in the
summary killings of thousands of suspected criminals without trial, prompting
criticism from the Obama administration.
Situations like these are already leading
some former government officials from both parties to ask if America’s reaction
to events around the world could potentially be shaded, if only slightly, by
the Trump family’s financial ties with foreign players. They worry, too, that
in some countries those connections could compromise American efforts to
criticize the corrupt intermingling of state power with vast business
enterprises controlled by the political elite.
“It is uncharted territory, really in the
history of the republic, as we have never had a president with such an empire
both in the United States and overseas,” said Michael J. Green, who served on
the National Security Council in the administration of George W. Bush, and
before that at the Defense Department.
The globe is dotted with such potential
conflicts. Mr. Trump’s companies have business operations in at least 20 countries,
with a particular focus on the developing world, including outposts in nations
like India, Indonesia and Uruguay, according to a New York Times analysis of
his presidential campaign financial disclosures. What’s more, the true extent
of Mr. Trump’s global financial entanglements is unclear, since he has refused
to release his tax returns and has not made public a list of his lenders.
In an interview with The Times on Tuesday,
Mr. Trump boasted again about the global reach of his business — and his
family’s ability to keep it running after he takes office.
“I’ve built a very great company and it’s a
big company and it’s all over the world,” Mr. Trump said, adding later: “I
don’t care about my company. It doesn’t matter. My kids run it.”
In a written statement, his spokeswoman, Hope
Hicks, said Mr. Trump and his family were committed to addressing any issues
related to his financial holdings.
“Vetting of various structures and immediate
transfer of the business remains a top priority for both President-elect Trump,
his adult children and his executives,” she said.
But a review by The Times of these business
dealings identified a menu of the kinds of complications that could create a
running source of controversy for Mr. Trump, as well as tensions between his
priorities as president and the needs and objectives of his companies.
In Brazil, for example, the beachfront Trump
Hotel Rio de Janeiro — one of Mr. Trump’s many branding deals, in which he does
not have an equity stake — is part of a broad investigation by a federal
prosecutor who is examining whether illicit commissions and bribes resulted in
apparent favoritism by two pension funds that invested in the project.
Several of Mr. Trump’s real estate ventures
in India — where he has more projects underway than in any location outside
North America — are being built through companies with family ties to India’s
most important political party. This makes it more likely that Indian
government officials will do special favors benefiting Mr. Trump’s projects,
including pressuring state-owned banks to extend favorable loans.
In Ireland and Scotland, executives from Mr.
Trump’s golf courses have been waging two separate battles with local
officials. The most recent centers on the Trump Organization’s plans to build a
flood-prevention sea wall at the course on the Irish coast. Some
environmentalists say the wall could destroy an endangered snail’s habitat — a
dispute that will soon involve the president of the United States.
And in Turkey, officials including President
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a religiously conservative Muslim, demanded that Mr.
Trump’s name be removed from Trump Towers in Istanbul after he called for a ban
on Muslims entering the United States. More recently, after Mr. Trump came to
the defense of Mr. Erdogan — suggesting that he had the right to crack down
harshly on dissidents after a failed coup — the calls for action against Trump
Towers have stopped, fueling worries that Mr. Trump’s policies toward Turkey
might be shaped by his commercial interests.
Mr. Trump has acknowledged a conflict of
interest in Turkey. “I have a little conflict of interest because I have a
major, major building in Istanbul,” he said during a radio interview last year
with Stephen K. Bannon, the Breitbart News executive who has since been
designated his chief White House strategist. “It’s a tremendously successful
job. It’s called Trump Towers — two towers, instead of one. Not the usual one.
It’s two.”
These tangled ties already have some members
of Congress — including at least one Republican representative — calling on Mr.
Trump to provide more information on his international operations, or perhaps
for a congressional inquiry into them.
“You rightly criticized Hillary for Clinton
Foundation,” Representative Justin Amash, Republican of Michigan, said in a
Twitter message on Monday. “If you have contracts w/foreign govts, it’s
certainly a big deal, too. #DrainTheSwamp”
David J. Kramer, who served as assistant
secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor during the Bush
administration, said Mr. Trump’s financial entanglements could undermine
decades of efforts by Democratic and Republican presidents to promote
government transparency — and to use the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to stop
contractors from paying bribes to secure government work abroad.
“This will make it a little harder to be able
to go out and proselytize around these things,” Mr. Kramer said.
Even if Mr. Trump and his family seek no
special advantages from foreign governments, officials overseas may feel
compelled to help the Trump family by, say, accelerating building permits or
pushing more business to one of the new president’s hotels or golf courses,
according to several former State Department officials.
“The working assumption on behalf of all
these foreign government officials will be that there is an advantage to doing
business with the Trump organization,” said Michael H. Fuchs, who was until
recently deputy assistant secretary at the bureau of East Asian and Pacific
affairs. “They will think it will ingratiate themselves with the Trump
administration. And this will significantly complicate United States foreign
policy and our relationships around the world.”
At the same time, Mr. Fuchs said, American
diplomats in countries where Mr. Trump’s companies operate, fearful of a rebuke
from Washington, may be reluctant to take steps that could frustrate business
partners or political allies.
Another question is, who will be responsible
for security at the Trump Towers around the world, especially in the Middle
East, which terrorism experts say may now become more appealing targets as
symbols of American capitalism built in the name of the president?
What is clear is that there has been very
little division, in the weeks since the election, between Mr. Trump’s business
interests and his transition effort, with the president-elect or his family
greeting real estate partners from India and the Philippines in his office and
Mr. Trump raising concerns about his golf course in Scotland with a prominent
British politician. Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who is in charge of planning
and development of the Trump Organization’s global network of hotels, has
joined in conversations with at least three world leaders — of Turkey,
Argentina and Japan — having access that could help her expand the brand
worldwide.
Mr. Trump, in the interview with The Times on
Tuesday, acknowledged that his move to the Oval Office could help enrich his
family. He cited his new hotel a few blocks from the White House, which the
Trump Organization has urged diplomats to consider patronizing when in town to
meet the president or his team.
Federal law does not prevent Mr. Trump from
taking actions that could benefit him and his family financially; the president
is exempt from most conflict-of-interest laws. But the Constitution, through
what is called the emoluments clause, appears to prohibit him from taking
payments or gifts from a foreign government entity, a standard that some legal
experts say he may violate by renting space in Trump Tower in New York to the
Bank of China or if he hosts foreign diplomats in one of his hotels.
“I mean it could be that occupancy at that
hotel will be because, psychologically, occupancy at that hotel will be
probably a more valuable asset now than it was before, O.K.? The brand is
certainly a hotter brand than it was before. I can’t help that, but I don’t
care,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “The only thing that matters to me is running
our country.”
Robert D. Blackwill, a former National
Security Council member who also served as ambassador to India during the Bush
administration, said Mr. Trump still had a chance to demonstrate that he could
manage these challenges once he was sworn in.
“Let’s listen and not prejudge,” said Mr.
Blackwill, a Republican who was so critical of Mr. Trump that he endorsed
Hillary Clinton. “I want to see what he does as president.”
BRAZIL
Nation
Under Pressure, Ventures Under Scrutiny
Donald Trump Jr., the president-elect’s
oldest son, gushed with triumphalism when he announced a deal in 2014 to attach
the family name to the Trump Hotel Rio de Janeiro, a lavish 171-room beachfront
project featuring cavernous suites with private plunge pools and a
4,000-square-foot nightclub.
“This is an exciting time to develop our
first project in South America and the perfect location to do so,” the younger
Mr. Trump (his brother Eric is also involved in the family business) said at
the time.
But just two years later, the venture is
embroiled in a criminal investigation in Brazil, pointing to unfulfilled
promises that are casting a pall over both the Trump business empire and the
president-elect in their dealings in Latin America’s largest country.
Anselmo Henrique Cordeiro Lopes, a crusading
federal prosecutor in the capital, Brasília, opened an investigation in the
weeks before the American election into $40 million in investments made by two
relatively small Brazilian pension funds in the Trump Hotel Rio.
The Trump hotel inquiry is looking at why the
funds — Serpro, which invests on behalf of retirees of a state-controlled
information technology firm, and Igeprev, which manages the pensions of public
employees of the sparsely populated Tocantins State — put so much of their
capital into the venture, which is owned by Mr. Trump’s Brazilian partner, LSH
Barra.
Back in 2014, the hotel might have seemed
like a good deal. Brazil was about to host the World Cup soccer tournament that
year, while Rio was preparing to be the venue for the 2016 Summer Olympics. At
the same time, Rio, the nerve center of Brazil’s energy industry, had been
bolstered by large offshore oil discoveries.
But Brazil’s economy began to weaken in 2014,
undermined by falling commodities prices, colossal graft scandals and political
instability that culminated in the ouster this year of President Dilma
Rousseff, who was replaced by her vice president, Michel Temer. The result:
Brazil is still grappling with its most severe economic crisis in decades.
The hotel officially opened for the Olympics,
but months later remains unfinished. The top floors of the property, whose
design evokes a futuristic pyramid, are closed. Parts of the hotel still
resemble a construction site, including the second floor, where
pleasure-seekers were supposed to mingle in a nightclub overlooking the
Atlantic.
The examination of the project by Mr. Lopes,
the federal prosecutor, has already found a series of “highly suspicious”
potential irregularities warranting a criminal investigation, according to
court documents. “It is necessary to verify if the favoritism shown by the
pension funds to LSH and the Trump Organization was due to the payment of
illicit commissions and bribes,” Mr. Lopes said in documents filed in October.
In his filings, Mr. Lopes said the size of
the hotel investments relative to the overall holdings of the small pension
funds reflected a highly unusual level of risk, especially for an unfinished
venture that failed to capitalize fully on the demand for accommodations during
the Olympics. Going further, Mr. Lopes positioned the inquiry within a broader
investigation of public pension funds, pillars of the Brazilian economy that
often work in tandem with large state-controlled banks and energy companies.
Mr. Trump first took interest in a Rio hotel
venture in 2012, when Ivanka Trump was having lunch in Florida with Paulo
Figueiredo Filho, a businessman who is a grandson of João Figueiredo, the last
autocrat of Brazil’s 21-year military dictatorship, which ended in 1985. The
younger Mr. Figueiredo spearheaded the hotel venture until recently.
In a statement, Mr. Trump’s Brazilian
partner, LSH, said it was innocent of any wrongdoing in connection with the
investments by the pension funds, and was cooperating with the criminal
inquiry.
Alan Garten, the Trump Organization’s general
counsel, said in a statement issued Friday that the investigation was not
targeting Mr. Trump or his company — given that it does not own the hotel — and
“has no knowledge whatsoever regarding any governmental inquiry.”
The investigation of the Trump projects is
unfolding at an awkward time for the Brazilian authorities. Foreign Minister
José Serra, Brazil’s top diplomat, publicly declared in July that a Trump
presidency would be a “nightmare.” Although President Temer has formally
congratulated Mr. Trump on his victory in a letter, he is still among world
leaders who have not yet spoken by telephone with the president-elect.
Even if Brazil’s executive branch actively
tries to seek warmer relations with Mr. Trump, officials will face obstacles if
they try to quell the investigation. Brazil differs from some other countries
in Latin America where presidents can easily exert pressure on prosecutors and
judges, with the judiciary steadily growing more independent.
“Brazilian diplomats could try to avoid the
problem of referring to the investigation when dealing with the Trump
administration, but that’s about all they can do,” said Maurício Santoro, a
political scientist at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. “This is
something that could hang over relations between the two countries for years.”
INDIA
Potential
Pitfalls in Dual Roles
On the other side of the world, Donald Trump
Jr. had other projects he was pushing.
In 2012, he flew into Mumbai for a brief
meeting with the state’s chief minister at that time, hoping to salvage a
residential tower representing the Trump Organization’s first planned project
there. He was hoping the chief minister, Prithviraj Chavan, would intervene on
his behalf to get the permission needed.
The participants recall the meeting
differently: Mr. Trump’s partner, Harresh Mehta of Rohan Lifescapes, said
development regulations had changed, leaving the project in limbo, and they
hoped Mr. Chavan could formalize a policy so that the project could continue.
Mr. Chavan said that in a 30-minute meeting, Mr. Trump and his partner were
“requesting a concession that could not be given.”
By the end of the meeting, in any case, it
was fairly clear that the younger Mr. Trump’s presence had not worked any
magic. The project was shelved soon after.
“He thought the name was so big, we would
bend backwards to satisfy him, but that was not the case,” Mr. Chavan said.
Kalpesh Mehta, managing partner of Tribeca
Developers of Mumbai, the Trump Organization’s development partner in India,
confirmed that Donald Trump Jr. had met with the chief minister, but disputed
the claim by Mr. Chavan that he had sought a special favor.
“The notion that a request was made by Donald
Jr. to waive any regulations is absolutely false,” Mr. Mehta said in the
statement, which was issued Friday. “The Trump Organization does not get
involved in the regulatory aspects and/or interacting with government officials
related to its projects in India.”
This example, analysts here say, points to a
potentially serious ethical hazard for a United States president who is also a
real estate mogul in India, with five projects underway. Mr. Trump was
operating much like other developers in India, who cozy up to politicians —
officially or unofficially — to push projects through the bureaucracy.
Often, they must obtain as many as 60
permissions and building permits from government officials, including
bureaucrats “whose main goal in life is to attract rent,” said Saurabh
Mukherjea, the chief executive of institutional equities at Ambit Capital, a leading
investment bank in India.
One of Mr. Trump’s projects, Trump Towers
Pune, is in fact under investigation by local authorities after another builder
alleged that one of its permits was fraudulent. Panchshil Realty has disputed
that accusation, saying the permit in question was not required for the
construction. The very nature of the country’s real estate business, however,
underscores larger concerns about potential damage to American efforts to
discourage corruption in business abroad.
In India, real estate is the main vehicle
politicians and businessmen have used to invest so-called black money, on which
taxes have not been paid. In cities, where land is scarce and extraordinarily
valuable, special favors from top political leaders can lead to windfall
profits, and negotiations between developers and officials are informal
affairs.
It is so routine for developers to pay bribes
at every step of the approval process that many bureaucrats have informal rate
sheets showing exactly how much must be paid to each official.
Politicians not only pressure the bureaucracy
to approve their pet projects, sometimes even when they are against local
regulations, they also squeeze government banks to give out favorable loans.
Top officials might “think in some way the
U.S. president will help them,” and “can put in a friendly word with the banks”
to extend loans for around 8 percent interest, rather than the characteristic
15 percent, said Vikas S. Kasliwal, the chief executive officer and vice
chairman of Shree Ram Urban Infrastructure.
“If the son goes himself, if the son is
willing to go and meet the prime minister of India, or the urban development
minister, that is a very big thing,” he said. “They will think the president is
meeting them.”
Another pitfall is that Donald Trump’s
partners in major projects are, in some cases, politicians themselves. Most
major Indian developers have some sort of alignment, direct or indirect, with
regional political leaders, who can assist in acquiring the necessary permits.
Mr. Trump’s first projects in India, which
are expected to increase in number over the next year, follow this pattern: His
partner for Trump Towers Pune is Panchshil Realty, owned by a family that has a
close and longstanding family relationship with one of the state’s most
powerful politicians, Sharad Pawar, the head of the small but influential
Nationalist Congress Party. (Mr. Trump was photographed — in an image
distributed on Twitter but since taken down — with executives from Panchshil
Realty on Nov. 15.) Mr. Pawar’s daughter, Supriya Sule, a member of Parliament,
holds a 2 percent share in Panchshil’s parent company, she said in an
interview.
Mr. Trump’s partner in the Trump Tower Mumbai
is the Lodha Group, founded by Mangal Prabhat Lodha, vice president of the
Bharatiya Janata Party — currently the governing party in Parliament — in
Maharashtra State. The Lodha Group has already negotiated with the United
States government; it announced a landmark purchase of a property, known as the
Washington House, on tony Altamount Road, from the American government for 3.75
billion rupees, almost $70 million.
His partner in an office complex in Gurgaon,
near New Delhi, is IREO, whose managing director, Lalit Goyal, is the
brother-in-law of a Bharatiya Janata member of Parliament, Sudhanshu Mittal.
Mr. Mittal, in an interview, has denied having any connection with the real
estate company.
Suraj Hegde, the secretary of the All India
Congress Committee, a national body of Indian National Congress party members,
said he was troubled by the dual roles Mr. Trump and his family would play in
Indian affairs — particularly given real estate’s important role in India’s
fast-growing economy, and the clout the United States has on the world stage.
“Basically this is the globalization of
lobbying across countries, which then tries to establish monopoly over real
estate,” Mr. Hegde said in an interview. He added that he was already calling
for an independent parliamentary investigation of such maneuvers, including Mr.
Trump’s real estate ventures in India.
“Establishing monopoly at the cost of small
players by business connections to Mr. Trump is very worrisome,” he said. “This
is not at all healthy for a democracy.”
TURKEY
Mixing
Business, Politics and Islam
Mr. Trump’s business interests in Turkey are
emblematic of two weighty contradictions for a businessman turned politician.
As a candidate, Mr. Trump railed against
moving American jobs overseas and promised to do something about it. As a
businessman, he invested in a partnership with a furniture company here, making
luxury furniture in the firm’s factory in western Anatolia and selling it in
the United States and worldwide — a partnership that apparently remains active.
Mr. Trump the candidate inveighed against
Muslims and threatened at least a temporary ban on their entering the United
States. Mr. Trump the businessman has in recent years had some of his biggest
expansions overseas, including in Muslim countries like Turkey, the United Arab
Emirates and even Azerbaijan.
One of the most visible Muslim-world symbols
of that contradiction is in the bustling commercial district of Sisli, on the
European side of Istanbul, where a pair of cantilevered modernist towers,
nearly 40 stories high, bear Mr. Trump’s name.
Turkey’s leader, Mr. Erdogan, visited Trump
Towers Istanbul — one holds luxury apartments and one office space, with a shopping
mall connecting the two — after their completion in 2012, with Mr. Trump and
Ivanka Trump appearing as part of the celebration the next day.
“We look forward to this being the first of
many world-class developments undertaken together in Istanbul and throughout
Turkey,” Mr. Trump said in a statement issued during the visit.
Beyond real estate, there is the Trump
Organization’s 2013 partnership with Dorya International, a luxury furniture
maker with a factory in Manisa Province, near the city of Izmir, to build
pieces sold under the Trump Home Collection.
But the presidential campaign demonstrated
how the goals of his business and politics ventures can come into direct
conflict, particularly once Mr. Trump in December proposed barring Muslims from
entering the United States, implying that all Muslims might pose a terrorist
threat.
“We regret and condemn Trump’s discriminatory
remarks,” Bulent Kural, the manager of the Trump Towers Mall, wrote in an email
to a reporter at the time, as he announced that the mall was considering
removing Mr. Trump’s name. “Such statements bear no value and are products of a
mind that does not understand Islam, a peace religion, at all. Our reaction has
been directly expressed to the Trump family. We are reviewing the legal dimension
of our relation with the Trump brand.”
Mr. Erdogan weighed in on the issue, too,
saying, “The ones who put that brand on their building should immediately
remove it.”
Mr. Trump’s next move helped re-establish his
standing. After a failed coup in Turkey in July, he defended Mr. Erdogan’s
crackdown on dissidents, saying in an interview with The Times that the United
States has to “fix our own mess” before trying to alter the behavior of other
nations.
“I don’t think we have a right to lecture,”
Mr. Trump said in the interview. “Look at what is happening in our country,” he
added, referring to violence in the United States. “How are we going to lecture
when people are shooting policemen in cold blood?”
In between his two remarks — one infuriating
the president of Turkey, the other comforting him — the calls for the renaming
of the Trump Towers Mall ended. But much more is at stake in relations between
the United States and Turkey than a shopping mall and two skyscrapers.
Turkey is a key player in United States
efforts to combat the Islamic State in the Middle East, and sits next door to
Syria as the United States has armed rebel groups in an attempt to remove
Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, from power.
The recent postelection telephone call
between Mr. Trump and Mr. Erdogan suggests that business and political roles
will continue to be mixed.
According to a Turkish journalist, Amberin
Zaman, writing in the independent online news outlet Diken, Mr. Trump told the
Turkish leader that he and his daughter — who participated in the call —
admired both Mr. Erdogan and Mehmet Ali Yalcindag, Mr. Trump’s business
associate in the towers, whom he called “a close friend.”
Ms. Zaman, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson
Center in Washington, said no government officials had disputed her account of
the conversation. “I’m of the opinion they were quite happy for this to be
published,” she said. A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump declined to comment about the
call.
Jennifer Harris, who served on the staff of
the National Intelligence Council and on the State Department’s policy planning
staff, said the twin hats that Mr. Trump and his family would be wearing in
Turkey would almost certainly complicate the jobs of American diplomats there.
“It makes me wonder if the Trump
administration will use the power of the state to help political or business
allies and hurt political adversaries and business rivals,” she said.
THE
PHILIPPINES
What
Stance Toward Duterte?
President Duterte’s antidrug campaign has led
to the summary deaths of thousands of suspected criminals at the hands of
police and vigilantes since he took office June 30. The killing has been
condemned by human rights activists — and the Obama administration.
In August, Elizabeth Trudeau, a State
Department spokeswoman, said the United States was “very deeply concerned”
about reports of “extrajudicial killings by or at the behest of government
authorities of individuals who are suspected to have been in drug activity in
the Philippines.” She added, “We have also made our concerns known.”
The question now, former State Department
officials say, is just what kind of a stand the Trump administration will take
as Mr. Trump and his family balance their personal and financial ties with
foreign policy demands.
Mr. Antonio first met Mr. Trump casually in
the 1990s and has been his business partner in the Philippines for five years.
President Duterte named him special envoy to the United States as the
Philippines angrily pushed back at President Obama for criticizing his deadly
campaign. At the time of the appointment, Mrs. Clinton was leading in the polls
in the United States presidential election.
Mr. Duterte has made clear that he does not
appreciate American meddling in his country’s domestic affairs.
“I am a president of a sovereign state, and
we have long ceased to be a colony,” Mr. Duterte told reporters in early
September, before a scheduled meeting in Laos with Mr. Obama that never took
place. “I do not have any master except the Filipino people, nobody but
nobody.”
Mr. Duterte handpicked Mr. Antonio as his
intermediary with the United States, said his press secretary, Ernesto Abella,
because of his business success, his previous experience as a special envoy to
China and the Philippine president’s “deep intuition about people.” The
appointment will be advantageous for the Philippines, Mr. Abella added, because
Mr. Trump already knows Mr. Antonio.
Even before Mr. Trump has been sworn in, Mr.
Antonio flew to New York and visited Trump Tower, where he met with Mr. Trump’s
children, who are executives at the Trump Organization — which oversees the
president-elect’s real estate ventures. This was a business trip, not a
diplomatic one, Robbie Antonio, Mr. Antonio’s son and the managing director of
the family business, said in an interview.
The two families are considering new ventures
as they finish work on the Trump Tower in Makati City, a financial center
within metropolitan Manila that is one of the country’s wealthiest enclaves and
home to many of the nation’s elite.
The $150 million tower — one of the tallest
in the Philippines — is on the gritty side of Makati about two blocks from
Manila’s most notorious red-light district, where it is common to see
prostitutes soliciting business and people sleeping on sidewalks. Completion,
originally scheduled for this year, is now expected in 2017. About 240 of the
260 units have been sold, said Kristina Garcia, the director for investor
relations.
“We are bringing Trump to the Philippines
because we believe that Trump exemplifies the best quality of real estate
anywhere in the world,” Mr. Antonio said in a 2011 video promoting the project
— in which Mr. Antonio is identified as “ambassador” and Mr. Trump also
appears. “It also exemplifies luxury and it exemplifies exclusivity.”
In the interview at the celebration in Manila
on Thursday evening, Robbie Antonio said he had little doubt of his father’s
priorities: He will put the Philippines’ interests above those of his company.
“It is for the good of the country now,” he said.
But Mr. Fuchs, who helped oversee United
States relations with the Philippines as the deputy assistant secretary of
state until early this year, said he was deeply troubled by Mr. Trump’s
overlapping priorities, particularly given the long list of globally significant
issues in play with the Philippines. These include planned joint military
exercises in the South China Sea, the fight against militant Islamic groups
based in the country’s southern islands, and the human rights abuses taking
place.
“What we already have is a blurring of the
lines between official and business activities,” Mr. Fuchs said. “The biggest
gray area may not be a President Trump himself advocating for favors for the
Trump Organization. It’s the diplomats and career officers who will feel the
need to perhaps not do things that will harm the Trump Organization’s
interests. It is seriously disturbing.”
IRELAND
and SCOTLAND
Over
a Tiny Snail, Big Concerns
The vertigo angustior snail is only two
millimeters long. But it punches above its weight.
The endangered little snail has helped stall
Mr. Trump’s plans to build a sea wall to protect the coastline along his Trump
International Golf Links course on the west coast of Ireland, in County Clare.
Environmentalists, as well as surfers, list a
host of concerns about the proposed wall, particularly its potential impact on
sand dunes. Along with the snails, a patch of the dunes near the course is
protected by European Union rules. But Mr. Trump’s organization has said the
golf resort development might be dead in the water without the sea wall, and
many locals welcome the business and the jobs it brings.
The battle is likely to be decided next year
in front of a national planning board, in the weeks or months after Mr. Trump
is inaugurated on Jan. 20, several people said.
The planning board was overhauled in the
1980s to insulate it from political meddling, and it now has the confidence of
environmentalists. But there is little precedent for the Trump situation, which
could involve a public hearing.
“They can be long, they can be lively, and a
lot of things could be aired,” said Sean O’Leary, the executive director of the
Irish Planning Institute, which represents the majority of the country’s
professional planners.
He noted that the national planning board had
considered a development proposed by a politician before, but that was a
holiday home that the Irish president wanted to build.
“The scale is slightly different,” he said.
Local officials have said the Trump
Organization needs to resubmit its application by the end of the year. In a
statement, the Trump Organization said it was “considering all potential
coastal protection options at present” and would be in contact with the local
authority before Christmas. The snail, the statement said, “is thriving on the
site.”
“Its only material threat is that presented
by coastal erosion,” it added.
Certainly, Mr. Trump’s golf courses in
Scotland and Ireland have remained at the fore in the president-elect’s mind,
even in recent days. Shortly after his election, he urged a group of “Brexit”
campaigners led by Nigel Farage, the head of the U.K. Independence Party, to
fight against wind farms in Britain. Wind farms have been a favorite target of
Mr. Trump’s in both Britain and Ireland, where he has railed against proposed
installations as a potential blight on the views from his resorts.
After a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump initially
denied that the matter had been raised with Mr. Farage’s group, Mr. Trump
conceded during his interview with The Times this past week that “I might have
brought it up.”
Tony Lowes, an activist who runs a group
called Friends of the Irish Environment, said Mr. Trump had once called him
because Mr. Lowes’s group also happened to oppose a proposed wind farm near Mr.
Trump’s Irish course on environmental grounds.
“He certainly hates wind farms, that’s for
sure,” Mr. Lowes said about the call.
His group decided against working with Mr.
Trump, and is now a leading opponent of his planned sea wall.
“The dune system will not be able to develop
naturally,” Mr. Lowes said. “It will be starved of the sand it needs to develop
and evolve and it will die.” He added, “The whole system there is alive and
mobile and moving, and the wall is intended to stop that.”
Mr. Trump’s representatives have advanced a
number of rationales for the sea wall, with the most straightforward being that
they simply want to buffer the land from a continuing erosion problem. The
proposal has previously attracted attention because an environmental-impact
statement submitted by Mr. Trump’s team highlighted the risks of climate change
and its influence on “coastal erosion rates.” That was a noteworthy claim,
since Mr. Trump has called global warming a hoax perpetrated “by and for the
Chinese.”
The Irish government has zealously courted
Mr. Trump. When he visited the course in 2014, he was greeted on the airport
tarmac in Shannon with a red carpet, a harpist, a violinist and a singer whose
voice cut through the runway clamor.
Malachy Clerkin of The Irish Times called it
“a preposterous welcome” and “the worst kind of forelock-tugging.”
Many locals, however, support Mr. Trump’s
development. Hugh McNally, the owner of Morrissey’s Bar in Doonbeg Village,
about two miles from the course, said the issue had been “sensationalized by
the media” because of the Trump connection.
“I’ll give you an example,” he said. Roche,
the Swiss pharmaceutical company, announced last year that it would close a
plant in nearby Clarecastle, causing the loss of more than 200 jobs. “If
someone told them you’d save those jobs by building any wall, everyone would do
it,” he said. “The only reason people are objecting here is because of Trump.”
THE
WORLD
A
Transition and a Business Plan
Mr. Trump’s family appears to have been
preparing for the transition to the Oval Office and ways to capitalize on it
both in the United States and around the globe.
In April, even before Mr. Trump had secured
the Republican nomination, his business moved to trademark the name American
Idea for use in branding hotels, spas and concierge services, according to the
United States Patent and Trademark Office. It was one of more than two dozen
trademark applications that Mr. Trump and members of his family filed in the
United States and around the world while he was running for president.
The applications offer a glimpse of where the
Trumps may intend to focus their business endeavors. Last month,
representatives of the Trump Organization in Indonesia, where Mr. Trump has
been pursuing two hotel deals, filed trademark registrations for use of the
Trump name in connection with hotel management. Similar filings have been made
in Mexico, Canada and the European Union.
Ivanka Trump has filed at least 25 trademark
registrations for her brand of clothing, cosmetics and jewelry in the United
States, Canada, the European Union and Mexico since the beginning of the year,
mostly recently in October. Mr. Trump’s wife, Melania, filed an American
trademark application for a line of jewelry in August.
As he prepares for the presidency, Mr. Trump
has made at least one concession so far, he said in the interview with The
Times this past week.
“In theory, I can be president of the United
States and run my business 100 percent, sign checks on my business,” Mr. Trump
said, before later adding, “but I am phasing that out now, and handing that to
Eric Trump and Don Trump and Ivanka Trump for the most part, and some of my
executives, so that’s happening right now.”
Richard C. Paddock reported from Manila, Eric
Lipton from Washington, Ellen Barry from New Delhi, Rod Nordland from Istanbul,
Danny Hakim from London and Simon Romero from Rio de Janeiro. Reporting was
contributed by Mike McIntire from New York, Safak Timur from Istanbul, Sinead
O’Shea from Ireland and Suhasini Raj from New Delhi. Karen Yourish and Gregor
Aisch contributed research.