Exclusively obtained company documents show a massive discrepancy between the purported amount of the loan and the actual amount of capital that Sberbank extended to IC Expert, the developer.

At the time of the Letter-of-Intent agreement with the Trump Organization, IC Expert had one other major development underway in the Moscow suburb of Reutov — a massive residential development complex called Novokosino-2. The microdistrict also includes public facilities such as schools, parks, and shopping centers. In an effort to fund the construction of two of the seventeen buildngs in the complex, IC Expert reached a line-of-credit agreement with the state-owned Sberbank.

The loan agreement was first realized on November 18, 2015, just three weeks after Trump signed the Letter-of-Intent with IC Expert’s chairman Andrey Rozov. In December 2015, three offshore companies that comprised the ownership of IC Expert pledged 100% of their share capital to begin executing the loan, and money began flowing from Sberbank to IC Expert.

The true owners of the three shell companies remain unknown, though at least two of those companies (comprising 75% of the shares) were controlled by a Cypriot lawyer known for his ties to Russian elite and involvement in multiple money laundering schemes. The lawyer, Christodoulos Vassiliades, is also a Director for Sberbank’s Cyprus branch — raising questions about a possible conflict of interest in this case.

According to business documents in the project declaration for the two Novokosino-2 buildings (number 16 and 17), Sberbank provided 4,595,900,000 (4.595 billion) rubles to fund the majority of the construction. The declarations for buildings 16 and 17 from IC Expert, shown below, note the Sberbank loan.

The purpose and amount of the Sberbank line-of-credit was affirmed in news reports and at least one independent analysis of IC Expert’s finances.