Jan. 17, 2018

The U.S. Treasury Department is convinced that the cash purchase of pricey real estate by faceless shell companies – known as Limited Liability Companies, or LLCs – is a shield for international money laundering. So convinced, in fact, that last year the department decreed that title insurance companies must divulge the names of buyers behind purchases of New York City co-ops and condos valued at $3 million or more.

But the cash buyers the federal government sees as potential money launderers are something quite different in the real estate empire of President Donald Trump: they’re valued customers. More than one-fifth of Trump’s U.S. condominiums have been purchased since the 1980s in secretive, all-cash transactions that enable buyers to avoid legal scrutiny by shielding their finances and identities, a BuzzFeed News investigation has found. Records show that more than 1,300 Trump condominiums were bought by shell companies, and that the purchases were made without a mortgage, avoiding inquiries from lenders.

All-cash purchases by shell companies do not by themselves indicate illegal or improper activity, and they have become more common in recent years in both Trump buildings and other luxury home sales across the United States. Developers such as Trump have no obligation to scrutinize their purchasers or their funding sources.

A months-long BuzzFeed News examination of every Trump condominium sale in the U.S. shows that such sales surged in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when some Trump businesses were in financial trouble and when Donald Trump Jr. made his now-famous remark about the Trump Organization seeing “a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

At the recently renamed Trump SoHo condo/hotel, for instance, 77 percent of the sales were to shell companies that paid cash, and one of the project’s Russia-born developers was convicted of money laundering in the 1990s.

Neither the White House nor the Trump Organization responded to repeated requests for comment.