In 2015 Jared Kushner’s company accepted a $250 million line of credit from convicted felon George Soros. (paragraph 19 below)…In 2020 your choice is Biden or Ivanka's husband: “It’s really up in the air whether two or four or whatever years of Biden is better or worse than four years of Jared.” May 25, 2020, Scott McConnell
May 3, 2017, “Trump Adviser Kushner’s Undisclosed Partners Include Goldman and Soros,” Wall St. Journal, Jean Eaglesham, Juliet Chung, Lisa Schwartz
[“The Unusual Power of Jared Kushner,” Time cover, Jan. 16, 2020]
“Investments show ties to major finance and technology names.”
“Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, is currently in business with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and billionaires George Soros and Peter Thiel, according to people familiar with the matter and securities filings.
The previously undisclosed business relationships with titans of the financial and technology worlds are through a real-estate tech startup called Cadre that Mr. Kushner cofounded and currently partly owns.
Goldman and Messrs. Soros and Thiel, as well as other billionaires’ firms, also have stakes in the company, which is based in a Manhattan building owned by the Kushner family’s company, according to people close to Cadre.
The Cadre stake is one of many interests–and ties to large financial institutions—that Mr. Kushner didn’t identify on his government financial-disclosure form, according to a Wall Street Journal review of securities and other filings. Others include loans totaling at least $1 billion, from more than 20 lenders, to properties and companies part-owned by Mr. Kushner, the Journal found.He has also provided personal guarantees on more than $300 million of the debt, according to the analysis.
In his disclosure form filed earlier this year, Mr. Kushner didn’t identify Cadre as among his hundreds of assets. The Journal identified his Cadre stake through a review of securities and other filings as well as interviews with people familiar with the company and Mr. Kushner’s finances.
Jamie Gorelick, a lawyer representing Mr. Kushner, said in a statement that his stake in Cadre is housed in a company he owns, BFPS Ventures LLC. His ownership of BFPS is reported on his disclosure form, although it doesn’t mention Cadre.
Ms. Gorelick said the Cadre stake is described in a revised version of his disclosure form that will be made public after it has been certified by ethics officials. She said Mr. Kushner has previously discussed his Cadre ownership with the Office of Government Ethics and that Mr. Kushner has “resigned from Cadre’s board, assigned his voting rights and reduced his ownership share.”
A spokesman for the Office of Government Ethics didn’t respond to a request to comment.
Ms. Gorelick said it is “very normal”
for a financial-disclosure form to be revised and that the form was
prepared by Mr. Kushner’s lawyers on his behalf. A White House
spokeswoman referred questions to Mr. Kushner’s lawyer.
Trevor Potter, a Republican former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, and other ethics experts said investments such as Mr. Kushner’s ownership of Cadre typically need to be disclosed. They said Mr. Kushner didn’t appear to violate disclosure rules by not publicly reporting his business-related debts and guarantees. But they said such arrangements ideally should be disclosed, in part because they could force Mr. Kushner to recuse himself from certain issues involving the lenders.
“Anything that presents a potential for the conflict of interest should be disclosed so that the public and the press can monitor this,” Mr. Potter said.
Ethics experts’ concern is that Mr. Kushner’s business connections could jeopardize his impartiality in certain areas and that, absent disclosures, the public is in the dark about potential conflicts.
Mr. Kushner’s rapidly expanding responsibilities range from working on a Middle East peace deal to making the federal government operate more efficiently. As a senior federal official, he is bound by ethics laws that require him to recuse himself from matters that would directly affect his financial interests.
Ms. Gorelick, who was deputy attorney general in former President Bill Clinton’s administration, said Mr. Kushner will “recuse consistent with government ethics rules.”
Mr. Kushner, the 36-year-old scion of a real-estate family, agreed with federal ethics officials to divest himself of more than 80 assets after he and his wife, Ivanka Trump, were hired by her father, President Donald Trump, as senior aides. White House officials have said some of the sales were needed to avoid potential conflicts between Mr. Kushner’s far-reaching job duties and his personal financial interests.
Mr. Kushner is retaining more than 200 other assets, worth a total of at least $116 million, according to his disclosures. These are mostly apartments and office blocks around the U.S. Like his father-in-law, he has declined to put these assets in a blind trust, which ethics experts regard as the cleanest way to avoid conflicts of interest. Someone close to Mr. Kushner said there are practical problems that made a blind trust not a realistic option.
Mr. Kushner co-founded Cadre in 2014 with his brother, Joshua Kushner, and Ryan Williams, a 29-year-old friend and former employee of Kushner Cos., the family-controlled business that Mr. Kushner ran until recently. Cadre markets properties to prospective investors, who can put their money into specific buildings or into an investment fund run by Cadre, which collects fees on each deal.
To get off the ground, Cadre turned to a Goldman Sachs fund and a number of high-profile investors. Among them were the venture-capital firms of Mr. Thiel, Silicon Valley’s most prominent supporter of the GOP president, and Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc., according to Cadre’s website. Personal backers include Chinese entrepreneur David Yu, co-founder with Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Jack Ma of a Shanghai-based private-equity firm, hedge-fund manager Daniel Och and real-estate magnate Barry Sternlicht, people close to Cadre said.
Cadre also secured a $250 million line of credit from the family office of Mr. Soros, a top Democratic donor who Mr. Trump [allegedly] criticized during his presidential campaign, the people close to the company said. Mr. Soros’s family office is also an investor in Cadre.
The investors declined or didn’t respond to requests for public comment on their backing of Cadre, but a person familiar with Mr. Soros’s family office said it had invested [in Kushner’s business] in early 2015 before Mr. Trump declared his presidential candidacy.
Cadre has solicited money from investors for several Kushner Cos. real-estate projects, according to information sent to prospective investors and reviewed by the Journal. Jared Kushner personally has stakes in some of the real-estate projects for which Cadre has raised money, according to Cadre documents and his disclosure form.
While Mr. Williams acts as the public face of Cadre, Mr. Kushner remains one of the owners, with the power to “influence the [firm’s] management or policies,” according to the latest public information on file with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. Mr. Kushner’s company JCK Cadre LLC is shown as owning 25% to 50% of Quadro Partners Inc., which owns at least 75% of RealCadre LLC, which does business as Cadre. Mr. Kushner has reduced his ownership stake to less than 25%, his lawyer Ms. Gorelick said. [“Common stock and 35 investments had been sold to a trust overseen by Kushner’s mother, Seryl, with other assets going to his brother, Josh, and some more to third parties.]
Mr. Williams, chief executive of Cadre, said the company has been working with regulators to update its public filings to “reflect Jared’s nonoperational, nonmanagement relationship with the company, which has been in place since the inauguration.”
BFPS Ventures, the company that Mr. Kushner’s lawyer said holds his Cadre stake, is shown on his financial-disclosure form as owning unspecified New York real estate valued at more than $50 million. The form adds that “the conflicting assets of this interest have been divested.”
Beyond Cadre, some of the assets Mr. Kushner is holding on to are hard to pinpoint, partly because they are housed in entities with generic names such as “KC Dumbo Office,” according to the disclosure form.
The Journal matched many of the assets to specific real-estate investments. An analysis of the debts on those properties, using real-estate data services PropertyShark and Trepp LLC as well as property records, found ties to a broad swath of U.S. and foreign banks, private-equity firms, real-estate companies and government-owned lenders.
Lenders to Mr. Kushner, either directly or via properties he co-owns, include Bank of America Corp. , Blackstone Group LP, Citigroup Inc., UBS Group AG, Deutsche Bank AG and Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC. Royal Bank of Scotland didn’t respond to requests for comment; representatives of the other firms declined to comment.
Mr. Kushner will recuse himself from matters to which Deutsche Bank or RBS are parties because he has provided personal guarantees on their loans, said a person familiar with his ethics arrangement.”
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Added: 6/25/2017, Washington Post: Jared and his mother have a personal line of credit with Deutsche Bank worth up to $25 million. A month before election day, Kushner with brother Joshua received a $285 million refinancing loan form Deutsche Bank with only their personal guarantee as collateral. Also, “Kushner’s company took out $370 million in new loans in October 2016:”
June 25, 2017, “Jared Kushner’s firm given $285 million Deutsche Bank loan just a month before Election Day,” Washington Post, Michael Kranish
“One month before Election Day, Jared Kushner’s real estate company finalized a $285 million loan as part of a refinancing package for its property near Times Square in Manhattan….
The White House, in response to questions from The Post, said in a statement that Kushner “will recuse from any particular matter involving specific parties in which Deutsche Bank is a party.” Kushner and Deutsche Bank declined to comment….
The [$285 million] refinancing loan with Deutsche Bank is mentioned in documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission as part of a public offering of mortgage-backed securities. It states that Kushner and his brother, Joshua, “will be guarantors” under what was called a “nonrecourse carve-out.” Such guarantees require more than a loan default to kick in….The terms of the guarantee, which generally are not secured by collateral, are negotiated between lender and borrower….
The corporate loan and Kushner’s personal guarantee are not mentioned on his financial disclosure form, filed with the Office of Government Ethics. Blake Roberts, a lawyer who represented Kushner on the matter, said in a statement to The Post that Kushner’s form “does not list the loan guarantee” because the disclosure relied on “published guidance” from OGE that he said “clearly states that filers do not have to disclose as a liability a loan on which they have made a guarantee unless they have a present obligation to repay the loan.”
The Post sent the language cited by Kushner’s lawyer to Don Fox, a former general counsel and acting OGE director. After reviewing the wording, he said in an interview that he would have advised Kushner to disclose the personal guarantee of the $285 million corporate loan because of its size and possible implications….
[Don] Fox said in a follow-up email to The Post that even if OGE “advised there was no requirement to disclose,” he would not have argued that point but “I would have nonetheless recommended Jared over report in this instance given the magnitude of the contingency and the public interest in liabilities – actual and potential – to Deutsche Bank.”
Separately, Kushner disclosed that he and his mother have a personal line of credit with Deutsche Bank worth up to $25 million.
The Deutsche Bank deal was one of the last Kushner orchestrated before joining the White House. It is among the dozens of complex transactions that he was involved with during his decade in the real estate business.
Although Kushner divested some properties in an effort to address potential conflicts, he retains an interest in nearly 90 percent of his real estate properties, including the retail portion of the former New York Times headquarters, and holds personal debts and loan guarantees….
Kushner’s company took out $370 million in new loans in October 2016, giving it $74 million more than the purchase price a year earlier. Along with $285 million from Deutsche Bank, Kushner’s firm received $85 million from SL Green Realty.”…
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Added: May 9, 2017, CBS News: Some of Jared’s divested interests are in trust with his mother and brother: “His common stock and 35 investments had been sold to a trust overseen by Kushner’s mother, Seryl, with other assets going to his brother, Josh, and some more to third parties….Jared remains the beneficiary of family trusts worth $600 million to him and his wife, Ivanka.”
May 9, 2017, “Are Kushner family real estate assets a conflict for Jared?“ CBSNews.com, Larry Light
“It remains murky just how much Kushner has rid himself of family-related assets. In a White House briefing on March 31, officials said Kushner had resigned from more than 266 entities and “divested from most of those that may have created a conflict of interest.“ A report in Politico said his common stock and 35 investments had been sold to a trust overseen by Kushner’s mother, Seryl, with other assets going to his brother, Josh, and some more to third parties.
Nevertheless, The New York Times reported on Monday that Jared remains the beneficiary of family trusts worth $600 million to him and his wife, Ivanka, the president’s daughter.
What’s to stop Kushner later, after he leaves the White House, from becoming a beneficiary again and rejoining Kushner Cos.? Apparently nothing, according to Richard Painter, the White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush. Painter, now a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, said the assets Kushner shipped to the trust “belong to the family,” and so he can reclaim them in the future.” …
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