The director of the US government’s ethics agency has criticised Donald Trump’s plan to maintain his business empire by turning it over to his sons.

Walter Shaub took the rare step of commenting publicly about a presidential ethics decision, saying that Trump’s solution to the potential conflicts of interest caused by his global business holdings broke 40 years of precedent.

Shaub, an Obama appointee who also worked at the agency during the George W Bush administration, urged Trump to reconsider his plan before his inauguration.

He said Trump should commit to “divestiture” – selling his corporate assets and placing the profit in a blind trust administered by a neutral trustee approved by the ethics agency.

Emails between the agency and the Trump transition team obtained by the Associated Press show that Shaub repeatedly tried to persuade the president-elect and his cabinet choices to agree to divestiture as the cleanest way to avoid potential ethical conflicts posed by their investments and businesses.



But while lawyers for several Trump picks, including prospective secretary of state Rex Tillerson and senior adviser Jared Kushner, have worked closely with the agency in shaping divestiture plans, Trump’s own lawyers and aides gave the federal agency no official advance notice of his plan to turn over his global empire to his sons, according to an official familiar with interactions between the two sides.

The official said that Shaub met once with Trump’s prospective White House counsel, Don McGahn, in recent weeks, but only to discuss ethics plans for several of Trump’s picks, not for the president-elect.

One of Trump’s advisers, Sheri Dillon, a partner at the global law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, said on Wednesday that Trump plans to have his companies’ operations directed by his two sons, but they would pursue new deals only in the US, not abroad.

Dillon said Trump would put his business assets in a trust but would hand over management of his international real estate firms to a management company based in New York.

Shaub said during a rare appearance at the Brookings Institution that he was “especially troubled” by Dillon’s comment that Trump’s liquid assets from stock and investment sales he made in recent months before the presidential election would be placed in a “diversified portfolio of assets” approved by his agency.

“No one has ever talked to us about the idea, and there’s no legal mechanism to do that,” Shaub said. He added that the only approved method is the government-qualified blind trust set by the Ethics in Government Act.

Shaub said his agency’s unusual Twitter comments last year complimenting Trump for considering divesting his assets was his decision, made to “use the vernacular of the president-elect’s favorite social media platform to encourage him to divest.”

He said he now worries that Trump has no intention of going through government-approved divestiture, a move that risks “creating the perception that government leaders would use their official positions for profit.”

Shaub said he had been initially encouraged by a Trump tweet last year that “no way” would he allow any conflicts of interest. “Unfortunately,” he said, “his current plan cannot achieve that goal.”