Palm Beach home buy shows how Russian cash helped Trump

Frank Cerabino

Donald Trump’s financial dealings with Russians has a Palm Beach angle.

“I have no deals that could happen in Russia, because we’ve stayed away,” the president-elect said Wednesday during his news conference in New York. “And I have no loans with Russia.”

But for years, Trump and his company have been the beneficiary of Russian flight capital, money that has been amassed by oligarchs and other highly connected Russian investors who received windfalls from the privatization of former public assets, and sought places offshore to park their money.

The emergence of this flight capital was well-timed for Trump, explains James J. Henry, an investigative economist and fellow with Columbia Read Frank Cerabino’s recent columns online at University’s Center on Sustainable Investment.

“The nine-lived Trump, in particular, had just suffered a string of six successive bankruptcies,” Henry wrote in a piece for The American Interest. “So the massive illicit outflows from Russia and oil-rich FSU (Former Soviet Union) members like Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan from the mid-1990s provided precisely the kind of undiscriminating investors that he needed.

“These outflows arrived at just the right time to fund several of Trump’s post-2000 high-risk real estate and casino ventures — most of which failed.”

One of these Russian investors was Dmitri Rybolovlev, who consolidated his wealth during the chaotic post-Soviet era by getting a controlling share of Russia’s biggest fertilizer company. Today, Rybolovlev is listed by Forbes as the 148th-richest person in the world.

Those riches include ownership of a French soccer team, two Greek islands, an $88 million Manhattan apartment, and a $20 million home he bought in Hawaii from actor Will Smith.

Rybolovlev also has the distinction of being on the paying end of a $4.5 billion divorce ruling, believed to be the costliest in history, although it has since been lowered and settled for an undisclosed amount.

In May of 2008, Rybolovlev,