Page 40 - bne IntelliNews monthly magazine December 2024

40 I Southeast Europe bne December 2024
The committee revealed in September that Serbian and Albanian government officials proactively approached Affinity Partners with proposals for real estate projects in their respective countries. The finding was part of an ongoing investigation into the firm's foreign investments.
Wyden said in a letter to senators that the “prospective real estate deals give Albanian and Serbian governments leverage over [the] Trump family”.
Specifically, Wyden points out that the respective governments will control permitting, local taxation and licences required for the projects to go ahead, while they also appear to own the
land where the two projects will be developed. This situation would allow the Serbian and Albanian governments to “extract unusual concessions” from Affinity in the process.
Affinity’s planned redevelopment of the former Yugoslav military HQ in Belgrade is particularly controversial.
The site, designed by renowned Serbian architect Nikola Dobrovic, has been kept as a memorial to the bombings related to the Kosovo war, and is seen by many Serbians as a symbol of Nato aggression.
In correspondence with the Senate committee, Affinity confirmed that the Belgrade project would include a
museum dedicated to the "victims of Nato aggression", a proposal that Wyden sharply criticised.
“It is wholly inappropriate for any foreign government to require an American
firm to participate in that kind of anti- American historical revisionism, an act that whitewashes ethnic cleansing and genocide and falsely recasts Nato as an antagonist, and it is egregious that a firm founded and owned by family of a former and potential future President of the United States would agree to it,” wrote Wyden in a letter published by the Senate committee.
Within Serbia, over 22,000 people have signed a petition calling for the bombed General Staff building in central Belgrade to be preserved, with more than 10,000 people signing up in the first 24 hours. “The construction of a hotel on the site of this building is illegal and represents the destruction of dignity,” said the Kreni-Promeni (Go-Change) movement when it announced the petition.
After Affinity Partners' plans in the Western Balkans were revealed, several other businessmen linked to Trump also expressed interest in the region.
In June, North Macedonia's President Gordana Siljanovska Davkova received a delegation of executives from the Trump Media & Technology Group and other business figures associated with Trump.
In September, Serbian media reported that Trump’s eldest son Donald Trump Jr, who is executive vice president of The Trump Organization, had made an unexpected visit to Belgrade where he hosted a private dinner with a select group of prominent Serbian business figures, including owners of construction companies and banks.
“Donald Trump’s Worst Deal”
Back in March 2017, The New Yorker told the story of what it headlined as “Donald Trump’s Worst Deal”.
To great astonishment at the time (reactions to Trump’s misdeeds nowadays, of course, frequently involve a shrug of the shoulders, people the world over having grown accustomed to Trump getting away scot-free over the years), the publication related how Trump appeared to have helped build
a hotel in Azerbaijani capital Baku that seemed to result from a corrupt operation engineered by oligarchs tied to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC – the elite ideologically- driven branch of Iran’s armed forces that Trump, in late 2017, instructed
US Treasury officials to designate as “terrorist”.
As things turned out the 33-storey-high five-star hotel and residence Trump International Hotel & Tower Baku never opened, though in 2012, The Trump Organization signed multiple contracts with the Azerbaijani developers behind the project with plans to deliver an “ultra-luxury property.”
The developers were close relatives of the now 72-year-old Ziya Mammadov, one of Azerbaijan's wealthiest and most powerful oligarchs, who served as transportation minister. In a series of cables, sent from the US Embassy in Baku in 2009 and 2010, and revealed by WikiLeaks, a US diplomat described Mammadov as “notoriously corrupt even for Azerbaijan”.
However, The Trump Organization’s chief legal officer, Alan Garten, insisted that the Baku hotel project sparked no ethical issues for Trump, because his company had never engaged directly
North Macedonia's President Gordana Davkova seen in June hosting a visiting delegation of American business executives associated with Trump (Credit: Pretsedatel.mk).
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