Now we know why Senator Mike Rounds won’t condemn billionaire Klan-fave Donald Trump: it turns out Trump is trying to cash in on one of Mike Rounds’s favorite posts of money, Chinese EB-5 investors:
Trump Bay Street is a 50-story luxury rental apartment building being built by Kushner Companies, whose chief executive officer, Jared Kushner, is married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka. It will have an outdoor pool, indoor golf simulator and sweeping views of Lower Manhattan; it adjoins an existing high rise condo, Trump Plaza Residence. The firm that was hired to seek investors, US Immigration Fund, is run by Florida developer Nicholas Mastroianni, who announced a partnership last year with a Trump golf course in Jupiter, Florida.
The visa program is known as EB-5. In exchange for investing at least $500,000 in a project promising to create jobs, foreigners receive a two-year visa with a good chance of obtaining permanent residency for them and their families. In 2014, the most recent year for which records are available, the U.S. issued 10,692 of these visas — 85% to people from China.
The Jersey City project has raised $50 million, about a quarter of its funding, from loans obtained through EB-5, according to a slide presentation by US Immigration Fund. Mark Giresi, general counsel of US Immigration Fund, said he believed nearly all of the EB-5 investors in the Trump project were from China.
Asked for a comment for this article, a Trump spokeswoman said by email, “This was a highly successful license deal but he is not a partner in the financing of the development.” She did not respond to questions about EB-5. A Kushner spokeswoman said the project was entirely legal and creating jobs [Jesse Drucker, “Trump Tower Funded by Rich Chinese Who Invest Cash for Visas,” Bloomberg Politics, 2016.03.06].
Yeah, sure, Trump will get tough on China... just like EB-5 money created thousands of jobs in South Dakota.
Tangentially Related: Joop Bollen lost his bid to move the state’s lawsuit against his erstwhile EB-5 managing company SDRC Inc. to Brown County. On January 22, Judge Mark Barnett ruled that the proceedings for Civil Case 15-270 should stay in Hughes County. Nertz! Now I’ll have to carpool with Joop and Jeff to see the show in Pierre.
The next time Trump calls Bernie Sanders a communist, Bernie can throw EB-5 in his face.
There won’t be any half-mil investors in this luxury boondoggle being built in the middle of some of the most inflated real estate ever. That is if it is all legal, and with Drumpf around,I doubt it is legal. As an aside, since Drumpf claims Scottish ancestry,shouldn’t his name be MacDrumpf? Or Shamus?