Everyone is looking for a smoking gun that ties Donald Trump's personal wealth to Russia. They have been looking in Russia and Europe for proof of this. It turns out the smoking gun is in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where a Trump branded hotel recently went bankrupt.
Two Russian businessmen, Alex Shnaider and Val Levitan decided to invest some of the profits they made off of being oligarchs into a hotel in downtown Toronto. According to the Washington Post, Trump licensed the use of his name to Levitan and Shnaider:
Trump licensed his name to Talon International for the Trump International Hotel and Tower Toronto. Since its 2012 opening, the building has been inundated with problems and was recently put on sale for a minimum price of $225 million. Last year, Trump made just over $1 million in licensing fees from the proje
Things quickly went bad with the project; Toronto Life magazine details the sad stories of victims of yet another Trump scam. But for our purposes, we need to look at who Alex Shnaider is and where he earned his money before 2004, when he paid Trump millions for use of the Trump name.
In 2007, after he bought a condo valued at $20 millon--then the most expensive home in Canada--The Toronto Star looked into where Mr. Shnaider's wealth came from.
His private company Midland Group, which he runs with London-based partner Eduard Shifrin (number 538 on the Forbes list at $1.9 billion) has diverse holdings, including steel mills in the Ukraine, the national power grid of Armenia, real estate, retail malls, and manufacturing in Russia and Siberia. The company has 34 offices and more than 50,000 employees and earnings in excess of $2 billion annually
Shnaider's business partner, Eduard Shifrin is a Ukrainian who made his fortune by being a steel oligarch when Paul Manafort's clients were running Ukraine. Shifrin is so well liked in Russia, that Vladimir Putin bestowed Russian citizenship on him last October.
So, in 2004, as Trump was declaring bankruptcy, two Russian Billionaries with no experience in developing hotels cut Trump a check for an undisclosed sum of money in exchange for the right to use the Trump brand on their hotel.
This is a payment from private interests controlled by the Russian government to Donald Trump that Donald Trump profited off of and is profiting off of into his Presidency. The Trump Organization had a contract to manage the Trump Toronto hotel until March of 2017 when the Canadian Supreme Court let stand a lower courts ruling that condo owners were defrauded and entitled to relief under Canadian law. On March 30, 2017, a Canadian judge approved the sale of the now-bankrupt Trump Toronto hotel to private equity firm JCF Capital.
A Canadian judge has found that condo buyers were defrauded by the Russian owners of a hotel that paid Donald Trump a fee to license his name. It is my hope that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police will open a full investigation into this project and President Trump's involvement in it. And if any criminal activities on the part of Mr. Trump are uncovered to forward their findings to the Crown Attorney.