Longtime banker for Trump resigns

President Donald Trump’s longtime banker at Deutsche Bank, who arranged for the German lender to make hundreds of millions of dollars of loans to his company, is stepping down from the bank.

Rosemary Vrablic, a managing director and senior banker in Deutsche Bank’s wealth management division, recently handed in her resignation, which the bank accepted, according to a bank spokesman, Daniel Hunter.

The reasons for the abrupt resignation of Vrablic, as well as that of a longtime colleague, Dominic Scalzi, were not clear. Deutsche Bank in August opened an internal review into a 2013 real estate transaction between Vrablic and Scalzi and a company owned in part by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of Trump and a client of Vrablic.

Vrablic and Scalzi joined Deutsche Bank in 2006 from Bank of America. Vrablic quickly made a name for herself as one of her division’s leading rainmakers. In 2011, she landed a prominent new client: Trump, who for decades had been mostly offlimits to the mainstream banking world because of his tendency to default on loans. With her bosses’ approval, Vrablic agreed to a series of loans, totaling well over $300 million, for his newly acquired Doral golf resort in Florida, for his troubled Chicago skyscraper and for the transformation of the Old Post Office building in Washington into a luxury hotel.

When Trump became president, his relationship with Deutsche Bank came under a microscope by regulators, prosecutors and congressional Democrats. Vrablic’s starring role in the suddenly controversial relationship — she was a VIP guest at Trump’s inauguration — pushed the publicity-shy banker into the spotlight.

The relationship between Trump and the German bank is the subject of congressional, civil and criminal investigations.