A major financial backer of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, who once owned a housing estate in which low-income tenants were said to endure “inhumane” living standards, has been nominated as the US ambassador to Belgium.



Ron Gidwitz, a 73-year-old businessman from Chicago gave Trump and other Republicans $700,000 in 2016, and acted as the presidential candidate’s campaign finance chair in Illinois. He will now undergo a month in a US state department “ambassadorial school” before making the move to Brussels.

There is a certain amount of relief in Belgium that the nomination has been made at all – more than a year after the last US ambassador left the country’s embassy in Brussels.

But Gidwitz could yet prove to be a controversial pick in the mould of Pete Hoekstra, Trump’s ambassador to the Netherlands, who was forced to apologise over his suggestion that immigration from majority Islamic countries had created “no-go zones” in the country.

For years, a company controlled by Gidwitz and his brother Ralph owned the Evergreen Terrace housing project in Illinois, where 90% of tenants were young African-American single mothers.

In 2013, Gidwitz told a court that he would not invest in the complex as it would be equivalent to a charitable donation, and if the owners had wanted to make charitable donations, there were better options.

The housing project was eventually taken over by the city of Joliet. But in a related court case, Gidwitz was forced to acknowledge that politicians including the then senator Barack Obama had complained about “inhumane conditions” on the project, where there was said to be an overwhelming stench of urine.

Gidwitz admitted to a court in 2017 that a girl had fallen from a window and died during a hot summer when the building’s air conditioning was malfunctioning and broken window screens had not been replaced, the Chicago Tribune reported.

He also admitted that a tenant was stabbed to death in a laundry room when security was not upgraded and that a shot man may have lain dying in the building’s courtyard for an hour before police were called, the Tribune reported. Security staff were said to be too scared to approach people entering the estate.

The mayor of Joliet has described the 356-unit complex of high-rise apartments as “unsafe and dangerous, a public nuisance and a blighted area”. A judge subsequently agreed that the standards were “deplorable”.

Gidwitz, in turn, told the court that Joliet was to blame for repeatedly blocking attempts to secure federal financing for improvements. “If you can’t get planning permission for a [security] guard house, you can’t build a guard house,” he said, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Guy Chipparoni, a spokesman for Gidwitz, defended the Gidwitz family’s management of the apartment complex and said other visitors “left with a much different impression of the property and of the people who live there” from that expressed by the Joliet mayor and other critics.

“Millions of dollars have been invested in unit improvements, infrastructure and security, as well as in the residents, through a wide variety of social services and continuing education programs,” said Chipparoni.

Gidwitz, co-founder and partner at the private equity firm GCG Partners, was a loyal fundraiser to Trump and is reported to have brokered a meeting between Trump and wealthy Republican donors at the Chicago Trump Tower before the 2016 election.

Responding to his nomination for the role in Brussels, Gidwitz said: “I have never done anything politically that I wanted anything for, other than to help people who needed to be helped. I really never asked for a job.

“I didn’t even ask for this one ... What’s really exciting about it is it’s so different. It’s going to be something that I’ve never done before. I’ve traveled extensively overseas but never lived overseas. I’ve had volunteer jobs but I’ve never had one quite as serious. There aren’t very many quite as serious as this.”

Gidwitz, a chairman emeritus of Boys & Girls Clubs of America, which provides after-school clubs, added that Belgium was at “the centre of Europe in terms of what’s going on. Nato’s there. The EU is there. Belgium has been a great ally of ours for 150 years. And from my standpoint, my French isn’t great, but at least I can speak some French.”