“My partner is the president of the USA,” one of Donald Trump’s Turkish partners declared after the election. How Trump’s ties to Turkey’s power brokers may complicate his presidency.

Emrah Gurel / AP Donald Trump speaks during the opening of Trump Towers in Istanbul in 2012.

ISTANBUL — It seemed everyone who was anyone in Turkey’s elite was invited to Donald Trump’s splashy new Istanbul shopping mall and towers, where Recep Tayyip Erdogan, then prime minister, now president, had shown up for the ribbon-cutting the previous day. It was May 4, 2012, and Donald Trump arrived for the opening gala at the high-end apartment and office towers and greeted shopkeepers alongside his daughter Ivanka. They were joined by two power players in Turkey’s plutocracy: Aydin Dogan, a Turkish billionaire who oversees a real estate and media empire, and his son-in-law, Mehmet Ali Yalcindag. “This has been a labor of love,” Trump told the dignitaries gathered at the Trump Tower shopping center opening. “My daughter loves Turkey, and she loves Istanbul, and she really always enjoyed coming here, and she’s been here many times. Her great friend is Mehmet, who has done some unbelievable job. I just want to thank the Dogan family and everybody involved. They’ve really become beyond partners. They’ve become very good friends.” Of all Trump Organization’s global dealings, perhaps none are as tangled and potentially fraught as his three multimillion-dollar business ties to Turkey, a key NATO ally and US partner in the war against ISIS that is drifting into authoritarianism under Erdogan. The licensing deals generate revenue for Trump’s family and potentially align their financial interests with powerful players in Turkey’s media, commerce, and politics. As in other parts of the world, there are concerns about the degree to which these Turkish deals will affect US foreign policy in the region. Trump’s ties to Turkey include licensing deals with the head of the country’s largest media empire, Dogan, which includes CNN’s Turkish edition and the premier newspaper, Hurriyet; its most well-connected furniture firm, Dorya, which caters to the country’s most powerful institutions; and also Anar Mammadov, a billionaire executive of two Turkish construction companies who is also the son of an Azeri oligarch and transportation minister US officials suspect of corrupt dealings with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, according to leaked US diplomatic cables. The connections place Trump squarely in the middle of Turkey’s domestic battles, regional tensions, and a crackdown on the press and opposition politics, creating potential conflicts of interest or their appearance at a time when the US has sought to win Turkey’s help on several Middle East crises but also to temper its repression of media and civil society.

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“You’re dealing with a country that doesn’t have rule of law or separation of powers that you had even a few years ago. So it’s much more risky to do business in Turkey,” said Ilhan Tanir, a Turkish journalist based in Washington, DC. “We are not going to be able to figure out which of Trump’s moves or policies he’s going to make for his nation’s interests or for his family’s interest.” Forbes magazine recently estimated that Trump’s global licensing and hotel management business was worth about $123 million, a small but not insignificant component of a portfolio it estimated to be worth $3.7 billion. A 104-page financial disclosure Trump released in May valued the Istanbul deal at no more than $10 million, the Dorya furniture deal at no more than $1 million, and the Baku project, apparently stalled because of financial problems, at $323,150. Trump has said he’s stepping aside from the running of Trump Organization, a far-flung multinational licensing and real estate development business that he runs with sons Donald Jr. and Eric and daughter Ivanka. But many note that the president-elect is still potentially susceptible to conflicts of interest since his long-term financial interests are aligned with those of his children. Just how deeply Trump’s main partner, Dogan, is enmeshed within Turkey’s political fault lines became clear this year after hackers released a trove of emails from Yalcindag, the point person on the Trump Towers project and a close associate of Ivanka, as well as a former head of Dogan’s media group. (The emails could not be independently confirmed but journalists at Dogan news outlets say they believe the emails are authentic.) Some of the communications suggested that Yalcindag, Dogan’s son-in-law, was feeding one of Erdogan’s sons-in-law and the minister of energy regular updates on goings on inside the newspapers and channels. He also discussed firing Hurriyet’s editor-in-chief, who has published reports and opinion pieces critical of Erdogan’s government. “With regard to some mistakes and decline in newspaper sales, as you know, I have been working for months to change the editor-in-chief of Hurriyet,” Yalcindag allegedly wrote to Erdogan’s chief of staff on May 11, 2016. “l am doing serious work to find a person that I can totally trust.” After the leak, Yalcindag denied that he had written the letters, but also acknowledged that his private communications had been leaked and subsequently resigned from his post as head of the media group. Several news sources reported that Yalcindag was in the audience in New York on the election night when Trump delivered his victory speech. The Trump transition team did not reply to repeated requests for comment on the potential conflicts of interest in Turkey. Dogan officials declined to answer questions about the Trump Towers deal. “The business relationship between the Dogan Group and Trump International continues under the same conditions as it was before Donald Trump’s presidency,” said a statement issued by the management of the Trump complex in Istanbul. “Dogan Group is a business organization and the current relationship is entirely business-driven. Therefore, it is not possible to establish any link between Dogan Group and the political identity of US President Donald Trump.” Another partner, Turkish interior design and furniture maker Dorya International, has been producing glitzy, Trump-branded furniture collections that often feature the brand’s signature marble and gilded brass. The well-connected, private company, headed by Doruk Yorgancoglu, boasts on its website that it has furnished the offices of the Turkish presidency and Prime Ministry, as well as those of the armed forces, the Ministry of the Interior, the National Security Council, and many Turkish embassies around the world. The same page lists Trump-branded properties in Chicago, Miami, Virginia and Washington as references. “My partner is the president of the USA,” Yorgancoglu declared after the elections. He did not respond to requests for comment. Trump’s Turkish partners also expose him to perceptions of pay-to-play politics in Azerbaijan. His partner on construction of a 33-floor hotel and condominium complex in Baku, the country’s capital, is Anar Mammadov, the 35-year-old scion of an Azeri family whom US diplomatic cables allege “control a significant source of rent-seeking” and who American officials suspected of corrupt dealings with a former Iranian Revolutionary Guard general. The Mammadovs also own Euroasia Investing Construction, a $75 million Istanbul-based development firm. Mammadov did not respond to multiple BuzzFeed News requests for comment. In 2014, Mammadov was quoted as saying the Baku hotel and residential project would “bring a new generation of style, exclusivity and prestige” to the super-elite energy barons that have transformed Azerbaijan’s once-drab Soviet-era capital into a glitzy enclave awash in hydrocarbons wealth.



Emrah Gurel / AP Donald Trump and his daughter, Ivanka, at the opening of Trump Towers in Istanbul.