Tower of secrets: the Russian money behind a Donald Trump skyscraper

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One October day in 2007, a celebrity real estate developer in a greatcoat and powder-blue tie alighted from a stretch limousine in Toronto’s financial district. Before a bank of photographers, he took hold of a golden shovel. To his left, also holding a novelty spade, was his partner in a C$500m (£287m) skyscraper, construction of which was to begin that day: a Russian-Canadian billionaire whose fortune had its origins in the collision of communism, capitalism and the KGB at the fall of the Soviet empire.

Also present were representatives of the project’s financial backers — an Austrian bank that would soon be accused of failing to conduct sufficient checks on the sources of its ex-Soviet clients’ money.

Camera flashes glinted on the shovels as the grinning dignitaries plunged them into a neat patch of dirt on which had been painted the word “Trump”. So commenced work on the Trump International Hotel and Tower Toronto. “People really want to own what I do,” Donald Trump told an interviewer that day, declaring that, among other qualities, the tower would be “taller than other buildings”.

The Financial Times has been investigating the money behind Trump Toronto for 10 months. Legal documents, signed statements and two dozen interviews with people with knowledge of the project and the money that flowed through it reveal that the venture connects the US president with a shadowy post-Soviet world where politics and personal enrichment merge.




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