IV. Kalpesh Mehta: Glass Palaces

In July 2012, just months after Donald Jr.’s failed attempt to salvage the first Trump Tower deal, Kalpesh Mehta established a company called Tribeca Creators LLP and was hired as a consultant to source and procure new projects for the Trump Organization. Within a year, he had resigned from all of Harresh Mehta’s companies and was calling his company the Trump Organization’s “exclusive India representative.” In 2014 and 2015, Kalpesh Mehta concluded three brand-licensing deals for Trump Tower projects: two in Gurgaon, a sprawling suburb of New Delhi; and one in Kolkata, which was formally launched in October 2017, nearly a year after Trump was elected president. Since then, the web site for one of Mehta’s firms, Tribeca Developers (he runs a number of similarly named companies: Tribeca Creators, Tribeca Devmgmt, Tribeca Dwellers and Builders), has been updated to indicate that his role as a consultant for the Trumps has significantly expanded: Tribeca is now involved in “every aspect of the development—from construction and design to sales and marketing—to ensure its conceptualization and execution is up to par with the high global standards of Trump.” Donald Jr. is now prominently featured and listed as an advisory board member. In a recent television interview, he said “Kalpesh has become truly a friend and not just a business partner.” The web site does not mention Kalpesh Mehta’s involvement in the first, failed Mumbai project.

Ten days into 2018, Mehta launched another Trump project in India, in Gurgaon, a global tech hub crowded with high-rises and gated communities that was, until a real estate boom in the 1990s, a lonely stretch of mostly farm and forest land. “Trump Towers Delhi NCR” (National Capital Region, the area surrounding New Delhi) features 250 sprawling residential units of 3,500 to 6,000 square feet, priced between $775,000 and $1.5 million. The twin 600-foot towers are billed as the largest Trump project in the country, with a reported investment of nearly $200 million by the developers. News of the launch was covered in almost every major English-language media outlet in India, highlighting a special offer to lure early buyers: a chance to meet the president’s son, Donald Jr., in New York. The offer quickly drew criticism in the United States from ethics experts such as Norman Eisen, who served as ethics adviser to the Obama administration. Eisen, who now chairs the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told The Guardian that offering access to Donald Jr. to anyone who could afford to buy a Trump property in India was an “ethics atrocity” and “a conduit to attempt to influence the president.”

For this project, Kalpesh Mehta teamed up with a local development company with a Trumpian name: M3M, or “Magnificence in the Trinity of Men, Materials & Money.” Even in Gurgaon, a town built on frenzied and often illegal land purchases by politically connected developers, M3M has a poor reputation. The firm was founded by Basant and Roop Bansal, two brothers who grew up in a nearby village and started off as small-time land aggregators, known for buying cheap land from farmers and selling parcels at steep markups to larger and better-known developers. According to news reports, they were investigated for tax evasion twice, in 2008 and in 2011, when investigators—tipped off by a lavish $20 million wedding party Basant Bansal held for his daughter on a Turkish island—obtained evidence that the Bansals were hiding roughly $70 million of undeclared money. None of this seems to have deterred Mehta or the Trumps from pursuing a partnership with them.

A March 2017 police report outlined a complaint filed by a senior state forest official accusing M3M of bribing forest guards with $6,000 for permission to illegally fell more than 2,000 trees. Despite being an unknown player outside of Gurgaon, M3M’s star has risen since 2014, following Modi’s election and the completion of its licensing agreement with the Trumps. The Bansals have been invited to join Modi’s official business delegation on international trips to Russia and Japan. As for the police complaint against them, an investigation is still technically open, a source familiar with the case told me, but M3M has used its political connections to “manage” the police. (The Gurgaon police department didn’t respond to inquiries about the status of the complaint, and neither did M3M.)

Eisen called offering access to Donald Jr. to anyone who could afford to buy a Trump property in India was an “ethics atrocity” and “a conduit to attempt to influence the president.”

These connections also came in handy when it was time to get permissions for the Trump Towers project, with help from the daughter of the American president. According to a state planning official familiar with approvals on the project, final permissions were expedited after a high-level visit to the country by Ivanka Trump, who had been invited personally by Modi to head the U.S. delegation to a “Global Entrepreneurship Summit” in the southern city of Hyderabad, in late November 2017. Shortly after her visit, clearances for the Gurgaon Trump Towers went through in “no time,” based on directives from BJP party leaders in New Delhi, the planning official said.

When I visited the construction site in January, on the eastern edge of Gurgaon, an M3M sales associate pointed to a small, bare patch of land, surrounded by several other high-rises, a golf course, and a parking lot, as the spot where the Trump Towers would eventually be built. The Gurgaon towers are part of a larger project called Golf Estate, still under construction by M3M. No one from M3M would answer any of my questions about the project; I was directed instead to a sales office a few miles away, housed at the five-star Gurgaon Oberoi hotel and marked by the signature gold TRUMP sign. The saleswoman there told me that M3M was only responsible for acquiring the land and the permissions on the project: The construction, design, and sales would all be handled by Tribeca Developers—Kalpesh Mehta’s firm.

Trump did not report any royalties from this Gurgaon project in his ethics filings, nor did he list any licensees for the project. But Tribeca’s web site for Trump Towers Delhi NCR carries a disclaimer listing a company named Olive Realcon Pvt Ltd as the owner and developer of the property, using the Trump name under license. Olive Realcon is an M3M subsidiary, and in January 2015, Kalpesh Mehta acquired a 10 percent stake in the company and was named a director through a shareholding agreement, an analysis of the company’s corporate filings revealed. Mehta resigned from the firm in October 2017, but two other employees from Tribeca Developers remain directors at Olive Realcon.

Kalpesh Mehta seems to be in charge in Kolkata, too. The tower site there is off a busy highway in the southeastern part of the city. When I visited in January, a single floor had been built. I met with two of the developers and the architect on the project, each of whom said they were not authorized to speak about any aspect of the deal. They did say they hoped that associating with the Trump name would raise their profile and directed me to Mehta for more information.

Months before the project launch, the Kolkata licensing deal had already brought Trump up to $1 million in royalties, according to his 2017 disclosures. The filings name five different licensees for the deal, including a publicly traded company called RDB Realty and Infrastructure Limited, part of the RDB Group, and one of the group’s subsidiaries. I spoke to Vinod Dugar from the RDB Group in January. He told me that the licensing fees for partners on these kinds of projects typically run to 8 to 15 percent of the total cost, which, based on press estimates, would amount to millions more in royalties for Trump. In 2011, RDB was barred by SEBI from participating in the stock market for four years on charges of insider trading, and last December, in a separate case, SEBI fined Dugar for insider trading, according to news reports. A day after Donald Jr. visited Kolkata in February, where he met with buyers, business executives, and real estate developers over cocktails at the JW Marriott hotel, Income Tax officials conducted a “search operation” in the offices of the RDB group over concerns of alleged “financial irregularities,” again according to news reports. Neither Dugar nor anyone else at the RDB Group responded to questions about SEBI’s charges or the Income Tax operation.



Another one of the five licensees: none other than Kalpesh Mehta’s Tribeca Creators. Even in the complex ecosystem of Trump deals, this arrangement stands out. Companies owned by Kalpesh Mehta are now paying money to the Trump Organization as a business partner and receiving money from it in their role as consultants and dealmakers. Again, Kalpesh Mehta did not respond to our repeated requests for comment, and when asked by a CNBC affiliate about the licensing fees, Donald Jr. demurred: “We don’t discuss these things,” he said.



The Trump Organization has one more active project in India, yet another deal brokered by Kalpesh Mehta—a Trump-branded office tower, also in Gurgaon, with a real estate private equity fund called India Real Estate Opportunity or IREO. The firm was founded in the early 2000s by two men who, like Kalpesh, had graduated from the Wharton School. They quickly entered the Gurgaon market and acquired large tracts of land. Announced in April 2016, during the heat of the Republican primaries, the Trump deal was for a luxury office tower with more than 600,000 square feet of leasable space in a private development called IREO City. IREO, like most of Trump’s other partners in India, is also tied to the BJP, in this case through a personal connection: The fund’s managing director, Lalit Goyal, is the brother-in-law of an influential BJP politician in New Delhi, Sudhanshu Mittal.

It was widely reported that IREO was investigated by the Income Tax Department and the Enforcement Directorate in 2010 on allegations that it had skirted foreign investment laws to buy farmland and had engaged in round-tripping related to an influx of more than $1.5 billion from companies registered in Mauritius and Cyprus. In October 2010, tax investigators also looked into Mittal’s accounts, on allegations that the senior BJP politician had routed undeclared money into IREO, his brother-in-law’s company. Both Mittal and Goyal denied any business links with each other at the time, and in November of that year, an IREO spokesperson denied the charges against the company and told reporters that the foreign investment had come from major financial institutions, passed through IREO subsidiaries in Mauritius and Cyprus. IREO, like the Trump Organization and the Lodha Group, has dozens of subsidiaries and holding companies across multiple locations, making it difficult to trace money flows and property purchases. It also appears to be in trouble with some of its largest international investors. Two prominent hedge funds, based in New York and London, sued the fund in a Mauritius court in 2016 for having “failed as good stewards of the investors’ capital,” according to a recent report in Barron’s. In an April 2017 letter to investors, the hedge fund managers reportedly said that ten years after investing $1.6 billion in IREO, they had only received $250 million, while IREO took in $300 million in management fees. By mid-2017, the Enforcement Directorate’s inquiry into IREO—as with its probe of the Lodha Group—had apparently stalled. An investigator working on the IREO probe told The Washington Post in June 2017 that he expects the investigation will now “go slow” because of the subjects’ ties to the president of the United States.

Donald Jr. poses with Kalpesh Mehta (right), his fixer-middleman and business partner, and with Basant Bansal from real estate firm M3M (Magnificence in the Trinity of Men, Materials & Money). Adnan Abidi/Reuters

As of this writing, the Gurgaon Trump office tower still only exists on paper. When I visited in early 2018, all that was visible was a sales office and a few goats grazing on a large, grassy expanse of land. IREO did not respond to repeated inquiries about when the project would launch, and its sales staff said they had no details. That hasn’t stopped the money from flowing to the Trump family. Between July 2015 and June 2017, IREO Private Limited paid Trump royalties of up to $2 million, via a Trump Organization entity called DT Tower Gurgaon LLC, incorporated in Delaware in March 2015, just a few months before Trump announced his bid for the presidency.

It’s an odd time to be launching so many new projects in India, during what many real estate experts are calling the country’s worst-ever slump for housing sales. “What we’re going through now in the real estate sector is the equivalent of 2007–2008 in the United States,” real estate analyst Pankaj Kapoor told me. He also showed me the numbers: Every city where the Trump Organization has projects has more than two years of unsold inventory; the capital region, which includes Gurgaon, tops the list with five years of unsold units. There is an unmistakable glut in the luxury market, and since 2014, Kapoor said, prices in the sector have been stagnant and sales sluggish.

But Trump and his partners are telling the press they are bucking this nationwide trend, selling preconstruction units at lightning speed. A few days before Ivanka’s visit for the entrepreneurship summit, Indian newspapers announced that the Trump Tower Kolkata had received an “overwhelming response,” selling more than 50 percent of the proposed 140 units, which start at roughly $600,000 for a 2,500-square-foot apartment, in one month. “We knew we were onto something when soon after the project announcement, our sales gallery was over-booked for the first two weeks, and we received over ten checks in the first few hours,” Kalpesh Mehta told reporters. “Trump is a successful name in real estate that no one questions, even today,” he told The Times of India. In February, during his visit to India, Donald Jr. told Business Today that the Kolkata project was 70 percent sold. In Gurgaon, he said, sales had topped $100 million in six weeks.

There are two possible explanations for these claims. One is that the numbers are simply overstated. We tried to fact-check the figures about Trump Tower apartment sales in India. Every prospective sale in which a buyer has put down more than 10 percent of the apartment cost is supposed to be recorded with the country’s new Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA). An analysis of RERA data in late January showed that fewer than 40 percent of the apartments in the Mumbai Trump Tower had been sold, not 60 percent as Kalpesh Mehta and Abhishek Lodha have both claimed. Registration data for the other projects in the country are still not available as of this writing.

Exaggerating apartment sales is a common tactic among developers eager to create buzz, lure more buyers, and secure affordable bank financing for construction costs. It is also a familiar tactic for the Trumps: In 2008, according to an investigation by WNYC, ProPublica, and The New Yorker, Donald Jr. and Ivanka discussed how to coordinate misleading information that they’d reached nearly 60 percent in sales in the Trump Soho, a hotel and condominium development in New York City, falsely inflating the value of the apartments. Buyers sued the organization, accusing the Trumps of a “consistent and concerted pattern of outright lies.” The Trumps were also criminally investigated, but the case was closed after Trump’s attorney, a political donor, met with the Manhattan district attorney. (The owners of the building severed the licensing arrangement with the Trumps in December 2017.)

The other explanation for the bloated sales figures is that people have flocked to Trump Tower projects hoping to buy something more than a place to live. Reporters and investigators have uncovered evidence that individuals linked to global networks of organized crime have purchased apartments in Trump properties in New York, Miami, and Panama. When Glenn Simpson, founder of the research firm Fusion GPS, testified to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence last November about Russian interference in the presidential election, he spoke of patterns “suggestive of money laundering” and of “Russian mafia figures” and “various criminals” buying into Trump properties. “There were a lot of real estate deals where you couldn’t really tell who was buying the property,” he said. “What they do show is enormous amounts of capital flowing into these projects from unknown sources.” In late January, Alan Garten, the Trump Organization’s general counsel, told Reuters that Simpson’s “accusations are reckless and unsubstantiated for a multitude of reasons.”

Soon after Trump’s election, Kalpesh Mehta told The Indian Express that Trump Tower apartments in Mumbai were already selling at a 35 percent premium compared to similar projects in the area, while the Pune units had sold at 60 percent above market. The identities and motives of the buyers, who may be seeking access to a sitting American president, won’t be revealed in the near future. Buyer information on the Trump deals is publicly available only if the sales are recorded or the buyer registers a mortgage. But, Kapoor explained, developers and buyers often circumvent the rules, to avoid paying taxes during the registration process. A 2012 report by the Indian Ministry of Finance acknowledged that many real estate transactions are “not reported or are underreported.”

Agency records for the Mumbai Trump Tower show only 36 mortgages and sales registered since 2014, eight to Mangal Prabhat Lodha himself, and another nine to current and former Lodha Group directors and officials. Of the 23 apartments in the first Pune tower, which was completed and ready for occupancy in 2015, only 16 sales have been registered; in the second tower, launched by Donald Jr. in February, only one has been registered.