East Bay Times

Trump’s banker at Deutsche Bank is retiring

- By David Enrich

President Dona ld 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.

“I’ve chosen to resign my position with the bank effective Dec. 31 and am looking forward to my retirement,” Vrablic, 60, said Tuesday.

The reasons for Vrablic’s abrupt resignatio­n were not clear. Deutsche Bank in August opened an internal review into a 2013 real estate transactio­n between Vrablic and a company owned in part by Jared Kushner, the son-inlaw of Trump and a client. Dominic Scalzi, a longtime colleague of Vrablic who played a role in that transactio­n, will also leave the bank.

Vrablic a nd Sc a lzi 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. In New York City, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. has been investigat­ing whether Trump c om m it t e d f i n a nc ia l crimes as he sought to get loans from Deutsche Bank.

A lawyer for Scalzi confirmed he was resigning from the bank.

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