Why Didn't We Hear More About This During the 2016 Election Cycle
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Neither project succeeded, at least from the Trumps point of view. The board of directors of Panamas Trump Ocean Club eventually fired Trumps management company, citing budget over-runs and improper bonuses. Meanwhile, the development of Trump Tower Baku was so poorly managed thanks to shoddy construction and missing payments that The New Yorker dubbed the building Trumps worst deal. Both remain marked blots on the presidents supposed business chops and on the record of his daughter, who remains a special adviser to the president.
But a pair of recent, in-depth investigations reveal the bungled buildings point to far more concerning missteps than mistimed bonuses or poor designs. The president and his daughter appear to have been, at best, unwitting accomplices to money laundering and grand corruption on a significant scale.
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Even if Trump and Ivanka were somehow unaware that the building served as a spigot for laundering cartel cash, it would have been difficult to miss the signs that Trump Ocean Club set up during the years that Panama came into its own as an offshore haven was being used for money laundering on a massive scale.
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According to Davidsons research, the construction of the building, which may well have been used to launder funds from those tied to Irans Revolutionary Guard, put the Trumps in possible violation of the U.S.s Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). The FCPA, originally passed in 1977, remains one of the U.S.s primary tools in combating foreign corruption, prohibiting American individuals and companies from bribing foreign officials. Indeed, the FCPA was, as Southern Illinois University Law Professor Mike Koehler wrote a few years ago, the first law in the world governing domestic business conduct with foreign government officials in foreign market.
https://thinkprogress.org/ivankas-real-estate-deals-corruption-33f65f778d0f/
It seems that it may have been Donald Trump, and his family, who needed win the presidency in order to prevent himself from being prosecuted. If Trump had not run for President and gained the office he might be in the mist of a federal prosecution.