A new report in GQ Magazine has revealed that a powerful oil trading family used first daughter Ivanka Trump’s old jewelry business to conceal roughly $100 million it owed to the Commercial Bank of Dubai.
Citing courts filing at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, GQ reported Friday that The Commercial Bank of Dubai received permission to subpoena Trump’s old jewelry line after the Al Saris, an Emirati family, allegedly borrowed from the bank and concealed their money through the “purchase” of diamonds from Trump’s business.
While the court documents don’t specifically reference Ivanka Trump by name, they seek permission to subpoena Madison Avenue Diamonds, which was the name of the jewelry line before Trump partnered with its owner Moshe Lax.
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The subpoena was reportedly approved in August, but Lax denied all money laundering allegations.
Moshe Lax, a founding partner of Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry, is the subject of numerous lawsuits and a $27 million IRS lien.
“They might have bought a piece of fashion jewelry at our former boutique,” Lax wrote in an email to GQ. “We will fully comply in verifying and providing info the court might ask from us.”
Lax has come under fire for an assortment of fraudulent business practices, some of which involved Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry. Mahipal Singhvi of KGK — a company that was given a multimillion-dollar reward after Lax, his wife and their businesses didn’t pay for a large sum of KGK diamonds Politico reported in August.
From Politico:
Trump spoke of her “good working relationship” with Lax in 2010 memoir, “The Trump Card.” While she detailed that he was “struggling” business-wise, Trump still admired that he was an “entrepreneur through and through.”
“Moshe was looking to take his business to a whole new level,” Trump wrote of Lax in her memoir. “In that way, I suppose, we were a lot alike, trying to make our own way along a path set out for us by our fathers and trying to extend that path in exciting new directions, which I guess explains why we hit it off.”
Ms. Trump concluded her partnership with Lax at the end of 2016 after her father won the election.
This is not the first time one of Trump’s business ventures has been linked to a financial scandal. Trump and her brother, Donald Trump Jr., were investigated in 2012 for real estate fraud. The president’s eldest children were accused of giving false condominium sales numbers for Trump SoHo to wealthy investors. The pair avoided potential fraud and larceny charges, as the investors involved agreed to a settlement.
Then there’s Panama, where the Trump Ocean Club is said to have washed dirty cash for Russian gangsters and South American drug cartels. There’s Azerbaijan and the Trump Baku, where the money allegedly being laundered was said to belong to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. And of course, there’s the Trump Soho in Manhattan, a magnet for money from Kazakhstan and Russia, and a property that one former executive on the project now calls “a monument to spectacularly corrupt money-laundering and tax evasion.”
Last month, investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was assassinated in her native Malta after exposing a massive web of corruption through the “Panama Papers,” including a revelation that Ivanka Trump helped her father’s Panama hotel venture with the help of an alleged international fraudster with ties to Russian money launderers.
Throw a dart at a map of the world and there’s a solid chance it will land near a spot where a Trump family business has allegedly gotten caught up in a money laundering scheme.
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