Brazil

Paulo Figueiredo Filho

Age: 33

Primary business/industry: Real estate/hotel developer

Time affiliated with Trump: 2012 to 2016

The outspoken young conservative whom Donald Trump chose as his hotel business partner in Rio has an unusual calling card — his grandfather was the last president of Brazil’s longtime military dictatorship.

Until March 2016, Paulo Figueiredo Filho was the chief executive of LSH Barra, the Brazilian company that owns the luxury Trump Rio de Janeiro hotel, which partially opened in July.

Last month, after federal authorities confirmed an investigation into questionable investments in the hotel, the Trump Organization abruptly pulled out of the project and severed ties with its owners, saying that “their vision for the hotel no longer aligns with the Trump brand.”

“I was really upset,” Figueiredo Filho, 33, said in an interview.

He had cultivated ties with Trump and defended some of the president-elect’s most controversial statements, such as attacks on undocumented Latino immigrants and lewd comments about women. His Facebook page features a photograph of him with Trump.

Figueiredo Filho has always expressed pride in the connections provided by hisgrandfather, João Baptista Figueiredo, the last president in Brazil’s 21-year military dictatorship, which ended in 1985.

“I met Reagan, Bill Clinton,” he told El País in a November 2015 interview. “I grew up my whole life surrounded by federal deputies and governors and met all the presidents of Brazil.”

Figueiredo Filho has said in interviews that he was lunching with Ivanka Trump at a West Palm Beach, Fla., golf club in 2012 when her father arrived in a helicopter. According to Figueiredo Filho, Trump said hello and was leaving when his daughter mentioned who the young Brazilian’s grandfather was.

“Then he got a chair and sat down,” Figueiredo Filho told El País.

In an October interview with Public Radio International, he defended Trump’s comments about groping women that had been recorded on video.

“The type of conversation he had, a private conversation, is very common in Brazil,” Figueiredo Filho said. “He almost sounded like a Brazilian.”

The Trump Hotel Rio de Janeiro was announced in January 2014 in New York and opened partially last July. It is scheduled to be completed next year. The Trump Organization licensed its brand and managed the property but did not own it.

In October, federal prosecutors said in court papers that they were investigating whether any “illicit payments or bribes” were involved in the decision by two public-sector pension funds to invest nearly $40 million in the hotel. No charges have been filed, but the criminal investigation cast a cloud over the hotel, which has been removed from the Trump Hotels website and is now called the LSH Barra Hotel. Trump Organization officials said they are not a target of the investigation.

Figueiredo Filho now lives between Rio and Miami. He said he is no longer involved in management of the hotel, did not deal with raising money for the fund that controls it, and is one of 17 shareholders, though he declined to specify his stake.

“I was never told where the fund’s resources came from,” he said.

–Dom Phillips reported from Rio De Janeiro.