Steven Mnuchin brings with him an impressive list of Wall Street and Hollywood contacts and has backed the X-Men franchise and Avatar

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Donald Trump has named an ex-Goldman Sachs partner, Hollywood financier and former Hillary Clinton supporter as his national finance chairman.

Steven Mnuchin brings with him an impressive list of contacts in Hollywood and Wall Street. The founder of film finance company Dune Capital, he backed action movies including the X-Men franchise and James Cameron’s box office record-breaker, Avatar.

Other entities financed by Mnuchin include Clinton’s presidential campaign during the 2008 election, when he and others at Dune gave liberally to the current Democratic frontrunner.



Mnuchin has also worked side-by-side with another leading Democratic party supporter: George Soros. After leaving Goldman Sachs in 2003 he formed SFM Capital Management with the billionaire Clinton-backer.

“Steven is a professional at the highest level with an extensive and very successful financial background,” said Trump in a statement on his campaign website. “He brings unprecedented experience and expertise to a fundraising operation that will benefit the Republican party and ultimately defeat Hillary Clinton.”



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Mnuchin has directly given more than $95,000 to political campaigns in the past 20 years, $8,200 directly to Clinton over the course of her campaigns for the Senate, and for the presidency in 2008. Separately, during Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, Mnuchin contributed $22,500 to Romney Victory, Inc and more than $23,000 to various other ways to support Romney including the Republican National Committee.

Mnuchin is the son of Robert Mnuchin, famed New York gallerist and notable collector of abstract expressionist painters Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock according to a 2013 New York Times profile. The younger Mnuchin amassed a personal wealth of a reported $46m working at Goldman Sachs between 1986 and 2003.



In October of 2014, Mnuchin joined one-time Hollywood powerhouse Relativity Media as co-chair of the “mini-major” film production company, at the time the third-largest independent producer-distributor of movies in the world.

When Relativity filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy10 months later, Variety cited sources blaming Mnuchin for the company’s misfortunes. Just before Mnuchin left and the company filed for bankruptcy, Relativity paid debts to OneWest Bank of Pasadena, which Mnuchin once ran. An attorney for another creditor left unpaid in the bankruptcy told the trade the payments were “money the company could have used to preserve itself”.

OneWest is notable for its aggressive pursuit of foreclosures on properties owned by the over-leveraged banks that it began to buy up in 2008 after the housing market crashed. Detractors say the bank, run by Mnuchin, tried to push homeowners into foreclosure so it could benefit from loss-sharing agreements with the FDIC. Mnuchin disputed the claims in a Bloomberg profile in 2012.

Trump, who has long touted his wealth as evidence that he isn’t beholden to his backers, told the Washington Post on Wednesday that he will now create a “world-class finance organization” to back the campaign.

“It’s a great privilege to be working with Mr Trump to create a world class finance organization to support the campaign in the general election,” Mnuchin said in the Trump campaign’s statement.