Sr. Trump com Tevfik Arif, e ao centro Felix Sater na festa de lançamento do Trump SoHo em 2007. O Sr. Trump discutiu acordos na Rússia com sua empresa de desenvolvimento, o Grupo Bayrock, mas nunca se concretizou.
Em 2005 Felix Sater, um imigrante russo, estava de volta a Moscou, buscando um plano ambicioso para construir uma torre Trump no local de uma antiga fábrica de lápis ao longo do rio Moscou, que oferecesse quartos de hotel, condomínios e escritórios comerciais.
As cartas de intenção foram assinadas e as imagens estavam sendo analisadas. "Houve uma oportunidade para explorar a construção de torres do Trump internacionalmente", disse o Sr. Sater, que trabalhou para uma empresa de desenvolvimento com sede em Nova York, que foi parceira de Donald J. Trump em uma variedade de negócios durante essa década. "E a Rússia era um daqueles países".
Os comentários favoráveis do presidente eleito sobre o presidente Vladimir V. Putin da Rússia e a conclusão de funcionários de inteligência dos Estados Unidos que Moscou agiu para ajudar a campanha do Sr. Trump concentraram sua atenção nos interesses comerciais do Sr. Trump na Rússia. Perguntado sobre o assunto em sua coletiva de imprensa na semana passada, o Sr. Trump foi enfático em um ponto: "Não tenho relações com a Rússia". E ele repetiu: "Não tenho negócios que possam acontecer na Rússia porque nos afastamos. "
O projeto no antigo local da fábrica de lápis falhou. E quando o Sr. Trump entrou na corrida presidencial, ele não conseguiu obter qualquer desenvolvimento imobiliário fora da Rússia. Mas não foi por falta de tentativa.
O Sr. Trump repetidamente procurou negócios na Rússia até 1987, quando viajou para explorar a construção de um hotel. Ele solicitou sua marca comercial no país já em 1996. E seus filhos e associados apareceram em Moscou repetidas vezes em busca de joint ventures, encontro com desenvolvedores e funcionários do governo.
Durante uma viagem em 2006, o Sr. Sater e dois dos filhos do Sr. Trump, Donald Jr. e Ivanka, ficaram no histórico Hotel National Moscow em frente ao Kremlin, conectando-se com potenciais parceiros ao longo de vários dias.
Em 2013, o próprio Sr. Trump estava em Moscou. Ele havia vendido os desenvolvedores imobiliários russos o direito de sediar sua edição Miss Universe naquele ano, e ele usou a visita como uma chance de discutir promoções de desenvolvimento, escrevendo no Twitter : "TRUMP TOWER-MOSCOW é o próximo".
À medida que o mercado russo se abriu na era pós-soviética, o Sr. Trump e seus parceiros perseguiram os russos que estavam recém-chegados com dinheiro para comprar apartamentos em Trump Towers em Nova York e Flórida, vendas sobre as quais se gabava em uma entrevista de 2014. "Eu conheço os russos melhor do que ninguém", disse Trump ao Michael D'Antonio, um biógrafo de Trump que compartilhou transcrições de entrevista inéditas com The New York Times.
Procurar negócios na Rússia tornou-se parte de uma estratégia mais ampla para expandir a marca Trump em todo o mundo. Em meados dos anos 2000, o Sr. Trump estava em transição para a maior parte do licenciamento de seu nome para torres de hotéis, condomínios e comerciais, em vez de construir ou investir no próprio imóvel. Ele descobriu que seu nome era especialmente atraente nos países em desenvolvimento, onde o rico em ascensão aspirava ao tipo de glamour ritmado que ele personificava.
Enquanto ele criou empreendimentos nas Filipinas, na Índia e em outros lugares, fechar negócios na Rússia revelou-se desafiador. Em 2008, Donald Trump Jr. elogiou as oportunidades na Rússia, mas também o chamou de "lugar assustador" para fazer negócios por corrupção e complicações legais.
O Sr. Sater disse que as cadeias hoteleiras americanas que se mudaram para a Rússia fizeram isso com acordos diretos para gerenciar hotéis que outros parceiros possuíam. O Sr. Trump, em contrapartida, estava buscando desenvolvimentos que incluíssem ofertas residenciais ou comerciais em que ele tomaria um corte de vendas, termos que os russos estavam relutantes em abraçar.
Mesmo assim, o Sr. Trump disse que seus esforços o colocaram em contato com pessoas poderosas lá. "Eu liguei para o meu fim de semana em Moscou", disse o Sr. Trump sobre sua viagem de 2013 para Moscou durante uma entrevista de setembro de 2015 sobre "The Hugh Hewitt Show". Ele acrescentou: "Eu estava com as pessoas de alto nível, oligarcas e generais , e topo do governo. Não posso ir mais longe do que isso, mas vou dizer-lhe que conheci as pessoas de topo e a relação foi extraordinária ".
Quando perguntado sobre a afirmação do Sr. Trump de que ele "se afastou" da Rússia, Alan Garten, conselheiro geral da Organização Trump, disse que era uma caracterização justa, uma vez que nenhuma das oportunidades de desenvolvimento se materializara. O interesse do Sr. Trump na Rússia, disse ele, não era diferente de sua atração por outros mercados emergentes em que investigou possíveis empreendimentos. O Sr. Garten não respondeu a perguntas sobre quem o Sr. Trump se reuniu em Moscou em 2013 e o que foi discutido.
Stalking Deals
Ted Liebman, um arquiteto com sede em Nova York, recebeu uma chamada em 1996. O Sr. Trump e a Liggett-Ducat, uma empresa americana de tabaco que possuía propriedade em Moscou, queriam construir um desenvolvimento residencial de alta qualidade perto de um antigo estádio olímpico russo. Enquanto se preparavam para se encontrar com funcionários em Moscou, eles precisavam de esboços da torre Trump que eles imaginavam.
O arquiteto cumpriu o pedido, entregando planos para o Sr. Trump no escritório de Manhattan. "Espero que possamos fazer isso", lembrou o Sr. Trump com o Sr. Liebman.
Logo depois, o Sr. Trump estava na Rússia, promovendo a proposta e cantando os elogios do mercado russo.
"Eu vi cidades em todo o mundo. Alguns que eu gostei, alguns que eu não tenho ", disse Trump em uma coletiva de imprensa em Moscou, em 1996, de acordo com The Moscow Times. Mas ele acrescentou que ele não achou que ele nunca estivesse "tão impressionado com o potencial de uma cidade como Moscou".
O Sr. Trump estava olhando o potencial de uma década, expressando interesse para funcionários do governo que vão desde o líder soviético Mikhail S. Gorbachev (eles se conheceram pela primeira vez em Washington em 1987) para o militar Alexander Lebed.
O projeto de 1996 nunca se materializou, mas até então o Sr. Trump já era bem conhecido na Rússia. Moscou estava no meio de um boom da construção, que transformou a capital de uma extensão monótona e pós-soviética em uma cidade brilhantemente moderna.
Yuri M. Luzhkov, prefeito de Moscou na época, disse em uma entrevista que se encontrou com o Sr. Trump e mostrou-lhe planos para um maciço shopping subterrâneo, apenas fora dos portões do Kremlin. O Sr. Trump sugeriu conectá-lo ao Metro, "uma observação muito importante", disse Luzhkov. Hoje, os visitantes do centro comercial Okhotny Ryad podem ir direto do metrô para a loja Calvin Klein sem se aventurar no frio.
Nos anos seguintes, a busca do Sr. Trump da Rússia foi fortalecida por um crescente círculo de parceiros e associados no Canadá e nos Estados Unidos que tinham raízes na região. Entre eles estavam Tevfik Arif, um ex-funcionário do comércio da era soviética, originário do Cazaquistão, que fundou uma empresa de desenvolvimento chamada Bayrock Group, e o Sr. Sater, um parceiro da empresa, que se mudou para Nova York da Rússia como uma criança.
Bayrock estava em Trump Tower, dois andares abaixo da Trump Organization. Enquanto trabalhava para levar as torres da marca Trump para o bairro SoHo do Arizona, Flórida e Nova York, Bayrock também começou a procurar ofertas na Rússia e outros países.
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Mr. Trump with Tevfik Arif, center, and Felix Sater at the Trump SoHo launch party in 2007. Mr. Trump discussed deals in Russia with their development company, the Bayrock Group, but they never materialized.
It was 2005, and Felix Sater, a Russian immigrant, was back in Moscow pursuing an ambitious plan to build a Trump tower on the site of an old pencil factory along the Moscow River that would offer hotel rooms, condominiums and commercial office space.
Letters of intent had been signed and square footage was being analyzed. “There was an opportunity to explore building Trump towers internationally,” said Mr. Sater, who worked for a New York-based development company that was a partner with Donald J. Trump on a variety of deals during that decade. “And Russia was one of those countries.”
The president-elect’s favorable comments about President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and the conclusion of United States intelligence officials that Moscow acted to help Mr. Trump’s campaign have focused attention on Mr. Trump’s business interests in Russia. Asked about the issue at his news conference last week, Mr. Trump was emphatic on one point: “I have no dealings with Russia.” And he repeated, “I have no deals that could happen in Russia because we’ve stayed away.”
The project on the old pencil factory site ultimately fizzled. And by the time Mr. Trump entered the presidential race, he had failed to get any real estate development off the ground in Russia. But it was not for lack of trying.
Mr. Trump repeatedly sought business in Russia as far back as 1987, when he traveled there to explore building a hotel. He applied for his trademark in the country as early as 1996. And his children and associates have appeared in Moscow over and over in search of joint ventures, meeting with developers and government officials.
During a trip in 2006, Mr. Sater and two of Mr. Trump’s children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka, stayed at the historic Hotel National Moscow opposite the Kremlin, connecting with potential partners over the course of several days.
As recently as 2013, Mr. Trump himself was in Moscow. He had sold Russian real estate developers the right to host his Miss Universe pageant that year, and he used the visit as a chance to discuss development deals, writing on Twitter at the time: “TRUMP TOWER-MOSCOW is next.”
As the Russian market opened up in the post-Soviet era, Mr. Trump and his partners pursued Russians who were newly flush with cash to buy apartments in Trump Towers in New York and Florida, sales that he boasted about in a 2014 interview. “I know the Russians better than anybody,” Mr. Trump told Michael D’Antonio, a Trump biographer who shared unpublished interview transcripts with The New York Times.
Seeking deals in Russia became part of a broader strategy to expand the Trump brand worldwide. By the mid-2000s, Mr. Trump was transitioning to mostly licensing his name to hotel, condominium and commercial towers rather than building or investing in real estate himself. He discovered that his name was especially attractive in developing countries where the rising rich aspired to the type of ritzy glamour he personified.
While he nailed down ventures in the Philippines, India and elsewhere, closing deals in Russia proved challenging. In 2008, Donald Trump Jr. praised the opportunities in Russia, but also called it a “scary place” to do business because of corruption and legal complications.
Mr. Sater said that American hotel chains that had moved into Russia did so with straightforward agreements to manage hotels that other partners owned. Mr. Trump, by contrast, was pursuing developments that included residential or commercial offerings in which he would take a cut of sales, terms that Russians were reluctant to embrace.
Even so, Mr. Trump said his efforts put him in contact with powerful people there. “I called it my weekend in Moscow,” Mr. Trump said of his 2013 trip to Moscow during a September 2015 interview on “The Hugh Hewitt Show.” He added: “I was with the top-level people, both oligarchs and generals, and top of the government people. I can’t go further than that, but I will tell you that I met the top people, and the relationship was extraordinary.”
When asked about Mr. Trump’s claim that he had “stayed away” from Russia, Alan Garten, general counsel for the Trump Organization, said it was a fair characterization given that none of the development opportunities ever materialized. Mr. Trump’s interest in Russia, he said, was no different from his attraction to other emerging markets in which he investigated possible ventures. Mr. Garten did not respond to questions about whom Mr. Trump met with in Moscow in 2013 and what was discussed.
Stalking Deals
Ted Liebman, an architect based in New York, got the call in 1996. Mr. Trump and Liggett-Ducat, an American tobacco company that owned property in Moscow, wanted to build a high-end residential development near an old Russian Olympic stadium. As they prepared to meet with officials in Moscow, they needed sketches of the Trump tower they envisioned.
The architect scrambled to meet the request, handing over plans to Mr. Trump at his Manhattan office. “I hope we can do this,” Mr. Liebman recalled Mr. Trump telling him.
Soon after, Mr. Trump was in Russia, promoting the proposal and singing the praises of the Russian market.
“I’ve seen cities all over the world. Some I’ve liked, some I haven’t,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference in Moscow in 1996, according to The Moscow Times. But he added that he didn’t think he had ever been “as impressed with the potential of a city as I have been with Moscow.”
Mr. Trump had been eyeing the potential for nearly a decade, expressing interest to government officials ranging from the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev (they first met in Washington in 1987) to the military figure Alexander Lebed.
The 1996 project never materialized, but by then Mr. Trump was already well known in Russia. Moscow was in the midst of a construction boom, which transformed the capital from a drab, post-Soviet expanse into a sparkly modern city.
Yuri M. Luzhkov, Moscow’s mayor at the time, said in an interview that he had met with Mr. Trump and showed him plans for a massive underground shopping mall just outside the Kremlin gates. Mr. Trump suggested connecting it to the Metro, “a very important observation,” Mr. Luzhkov said. Today, visitors to the Okhotny Ryad shopping center can go straight from the Metro to the Calvin Klein store without venturing into the cold.
In the following years, Mr. Trump’s pursuit of Russia was strengthened by a growing circle of partners and associates in Canada and the United States who had roots in the region. Among them were Tevfik Arif, a former Soviet-era commerce official originally from Kazakhstan who founded a development company called the Bayrock Group, and Mr. Sater, a partner in the firm, who had moved to New York from Russia as a child.
Bayrock was in Trump Tower, two floors below the Trump Organization. While working to take Trump-branded towers to Arizona, Florida and New York’s SoHo neighborhood, Bayrock also began scouting for deals in Russia and other countries.
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“We looked at some very, very large properties in Russia,” Mr. Sater said. “Think of a large Vegas high-rise.”
When Mr. Sater traveled to Moscow with Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. to meet with developers in 2006, he said their attitude could be summarized as “nice, big city, great. Let’s do a deal here.”
Mr. Trump continued to work with Mr. Sater even after his role in a huge stock manipulation scheme involving Mafia figures and Russian criminals was revealed; Mr. Sater pleaded guilty and served as a government informant.
In 2007, Mr. Trump discussed a deal for a Trump International Hotel and Tower in Moscow that Bayrock had lined up with Russian investors.
“It would be a nonexclusive deal, so it would not have precluded me from doing other deals in Moscow, which was very important to me,” Mr. Trump said in a deposition in an unsuccessful libel suit he brought against Tim O’Brien, a journalist.
He claimed the development had fallen apart after Mr. O’Brien wrote a book saying that Mr. Trump was worth far less than he claimed. But Mr. Trump said he was close to striking another real estate deal in Moscow.
“We’re going to do one fairly soon,” he said. Moscow, he insisted “will be one of the cities where we will be.”
Making a Mark
The Trump brand did appear in Russia, but not quite as the grand edifice the real estate mogul had envisioned.
Trump Super Premium Vodka, with the shine of bottles glazed with 24-karat gold, was presented at the Millionaire’s Fair in Moscow in 2007, and large orders for the spirits followed. The vodka was sold in Russia as late as 2009, but eventually fizzled out. In a news release, Mr. Trump heralded it as a “tremendous achievement.”
He tried — and failed — to start a reality show in St. Petersburg in 2008 starring a Russian mixed martial arts fighter.
But real estate developments remained a constant goal. From 2006 to 2008, his company applied for several trademarks in Russia, including Trump, Trump Tower, Trump International Hotel and Tower, and Trump Home, according to a record search by Sojuzpatent, a Russian intellectual property firm.
Donald Trump Jr. became a regular presence in Russia. Speaking at a 2008 Manhattan real estate conference, he confessed to fears of doing business in Russia, saying there is “an issue of ‘Will I ever see my money back out of that deal or can I actually trust the person I am doing the deal with?’” according to coverage of his remarks in eTurboNews.
But he told the Manhattan audience that “I really prefer Moscow over all cities in the world” and that he had visited Russia a half-dozen times in 18 months.
In 2011, he was still at it. “Heading to the airport to go to Moscow for business,” he tweeted that year.
Mr. Trump himself was back in Moscow in 2013, attending the Miss Universe pageant, which he owned with NBC.
Earlier that year, at the Miss USA pageant in Las Vegas, he had announced that Aras and Emin Agalarov, father and son real estate developers in Russia, would host the worldwide competition.
Erin Brady, that year’s Miss USA winner, who watched the announcement from backstage of the auditorium at Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino, said the news was a surprise. She was expecting one of the Latin American countries where beauty pageants are widely celebrated.
“I was like, ‘Wow, Russia, I never thought of that,’” she said.
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Phil Ruffin, Mr. Trump’s partner in the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Las Vegas, said he was happy to lend him his new Global 5000 private plane for the trip. He and his wife met Mr. Trump in Moscow, also checking into the Ritz-Carlton. Mr. Ruffin said he and Mr. Trump had lunch at the hotel with the Agalarovs.
The Agalarovs also reportedly hosted a dinner for Mr. Trump the night of the pageant, along with Herman Gref, a former Russian economy minister who serves as chief executive of the state-controlled Sberbank PJSC, according to Bloomberg News.
Talk of development deals swirled around the visit, and Mr. Trump sent out his tweet, promising that Trump Tower Moscow was coming.
But the tower never appeared on the skyline.
