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  • 2018-01-16 (xsd:date)
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  • Donald Trump Sold an Apartment to a Brutal Haitian Dictator? (en)
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  • On 7 February 1986, facing a domestic populist revolt and international pressure to step down, embattled President of Haiti Jean-Claude Baby Doc Duvalier, fled his country for exile in France onboard a United States Air Force jet. A New York Times obituary from 4 October 2014 described his rule over Haiti as one of bloody brutality, widespread corruption, and lavish excess: Once he fled, a new government in Haiti attempted recover these assets, which they believed the Duvalier regime had looted from the government and people of Haiti. A 14 July 1986 story in New York Magazine first reported that one of the assets the government of Haiti was trying to seize was an apartment in Trump Tower purchased in August 1983 through a shell corporation: The apartment in question, 54K, was purchased by Lasa Trade and Finance and — at the time of the 1986 article — was occupied by a friend of the Duvaliers named Jean Johnny Sambour. Serendipitously, thanks to a combination of late telephone bills and several checks issued to Sambour by the Treasury of Haiti, a United States law firm hired by the Government of Haiti was able to ascertain that, indeed, the apartment was owned by the Duvaliers. Recounting his experience hunting down the assets of the Duvaliers in a 2009 New Yorker profile, prolific corporate intelligence investigator Jules Kroll (who had been hired by the U.S. law firm retained by the Haitian government) said that Duvalier’s looting from the Haitian treasury was far from subtle: In March 1987, President Ronald Reagan signed an executive order freezing any U.S.-based Duvalier assets, which included — according to the New York Times — Trump Tower apartment 54K. The tale of Duvalier’s ownership of a Trump Tower apartment gained renewed interest in January 2018, thanks to a BuzzFeed News investigation of possible money laundering by the Trump Organization, combined with Trump’s alleged derogatory comments about Haiti. That BuzzFeed report investigated every U.S. sale of a Trump Organization or Trump-branded property since 1980 to see how many fit the U.S. Government’s criteria for possible money laundering, finding that a full 21 percent could fit that bill: That story does mention the Duvalier incident, reporting that Trump himself signed the deed of sale for Apartment 54K in 1983, but notes that there is no evidence that the Trump Organization, or Trump personally, participated in any untoward money laundering scheme in this case. However, as Donald Trump did sell an apartment in Trump Tower to Duvalier through a Panamanian shell corporation in 1983, we rank the claim as true. (en)
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