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NEW YORK (AP) — Deutsche Bank viewed Donald Trump as a “whale” of a client, was eager to land him and eagerly cultivated a relationship that grew from $13,000 worth of revenue to $6 million in two years, according to documents presented Wednesday at the former president’s civil fraud trial.
The bank’s dealings with Trump are a key issue in New York Attorney General Letitia James’ lawsuit, which accuses Trump, his company and some executives of hoodwinking lenders and insurers by presenting them with grossly inflated statements of his asset values.
The defendants deny any wrongdoing. They have sought to show that the bank felt delighted, not deceived, by Trump and courted his business.
“We are whale hunting,” then-bank managing director Rosemary Vrablic wrote colleagues in November 2011, as she began to forge ties to Trump and his family.
At the time, the family was looking for a loan to buy the Doral golf resort near Miami. Over the next three years, Vrablic’s connection to the Trumps yielded loans for that project, then two others in Chicago and Washington, as well as multimillion-dollar deposits in the bank.
Her division’s revenue from Trump business shot up from about $13,000 in 2011 to a projected $6 million in 2013, according to a bank document prepared for the then-co-chairman, Anshu Jain, before a lunch with Trump in early 2013.
The briefing document suggested “key asks” for Jain to make: “Obtain more deposits and investment management assets,” and “strategically discuss leveraging Mr. Trump’s personal and professional network within the real estate industry in NY” for the bank’s benefit.
And how did it go?
“It was a very, very nice, productive lunch,” Vrablic recalled on the stand.
Behind the scenes, she told a colleague at the time in an email: “It went great. Donald was low key and demure. Unbelievable. The conversation was fantastic. Not sure he could do it again for a second meeting but hey … miracles can happen.”
Adding that the two were planning to golf together that spring, she wrote: “I bet the real D shows up for that one.”
The next year, her direct boss went to lunch with Trump to thank him and “ask whether we can work on other opportunities with them,” according to a document for that meeting.
James maintains that Trump’s allegedly inflated financial statements were critical to netting his company the Deutsche Bank loans at favorable rates, saving him many millions of dollars in interest.
Trump says the financial statements actually underestimated his wealth and that a disclaimer on them absolves him of liability for any problematic figures. Trump, the current front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, claims that James, a Democrat, is trying to harm his prospects of returning to the White House.
“There was no defaults, no ‘nothing,’” he wrote Wednesday on his Truth Social plaftorm, calling the case “rigged” and “victimless.”
Trump personally guaranteed the loans at issue — standard practice for lending by Deutsche Bank’s division that caters to rich individuals, Vrablic said. The deals came with conditions about Trump’s net worth and, sometimes, liquidity, and they often required annual submissions of his financial statements.
Other current and former Deutsche Bank executives have testified that while they expected the information to be accurate, they came up with their own numbers.
Documents show the bank sliced Trump’s $4.2 billion estimate of his net worth to $2.4 billion when considering the Doral loan, for example. Asked Wednesday whether the cut had concerned her, Vrablic said that if the bank’s credit experts “were comfortable with it, I would be comfortable with it.”
The $125 million loan went ahead, with one banker writing in an email that Trump had “among the strongest personal balance sheets we have seen.” A top executive agreed to sign off but insisted on an “iron clad” guarantee from Trump.
Trump provided it, Vrablic said Wednesday.
Over the years, she and colleagues spoke enthusiastically among themselves about the potential for building on Deutsche Bank’s Trump ties. The bankers envisioned offering him estate planning services, presenting him investment options and netting more clients through word-of-mouth — “given the circles this family travels in, we expect to be introduced to the wealthiest people on the planet,” Vrablic wrote in a 2011 email.
She advocated within the bank for lending to Trump Organization ventures. In a 2012 email to then-Executive Vice President Ivanka Trump, Vrablic promised to ensure that a Deutsche Bank lending executive knew “how important you and your family’s business have become to the bank.”
Eventually, though, the bank started saying no. In 2016, when Donald Trump was on the campaign trail and his company sought a loan for its golf course in Turnberry, Scotland, the bank decided “to maintain neutrality to any political situation and not lend money to a highly politically exposed person,” Vrablic explained in an email at the time to Ivanka Trump.
Vrablic testified Wednesday that the bank was wary of “the increased exposure, scrutiny” surrounding a potential president and concluded “that it was not appropriate to go up in exposure.”
Judge Arthur Engoron will decide the verdict. He ruled before the trial that Trump and other defendants engaged in fraud and he ordered that a receiver take control of some of Trump’s properties, putting their future oversight in question. An appeals court has put that order on hold for now.
The trial concerns remaining claims of conspiracy, insurance fraud and falsifying business records. James is seeking more than $300 million in penalties and a ban on Trump doing business in New York.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has again railed at the West during a speech in which he said that Russia was “at the forefront of building a fairer world order.”
Set against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine that he started but did not mention by name, Putin told the World Russian People’s Council plenary session on Tuesday that Moscow was engaged in a “fight for sovereignty and justice” which was “one of national liberation.”
During the video address, whose transcript was released on the Kremlin website, Putin praised how the “Russian world… has blocked the way of those who aspired to world domination and exceptionalism.”
“We are now fighting not just for Russia’s freedom but for the freedom of the whole world,” he said, describing how “the dictatorship of one hegemon is becoming decrepit.”
President Vladimir Putin speaks during the 15th World Russian People’s Congress at the State Kremlin Palace in Moscow on November 28, 2023. Putin spoke of a “new world order” during the event.
Getty Images
Putin has repeatedly pitched the war in Ukraine as a proxy battle between Moscow and the West and in the face of U.S.- led sanctions has positioned himself as leading a pivot away from the current world order towards Asia and the so-called “global south.”
Name-checking the 1917 Russian Revolution, the civil war that followed and the break up of the USSR in 1991, Putin said people “are still paying now, decades later, for the miscalculations made at that time.”
In his view, these events had led to “separatist illusions” as well as “a policy of artificial, forced division in this large Russian nation, a triune of Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians.”
“We will never forget these mistakes and should not repeat them…any attempt to sow ethnic or religious discord, to split our society is betrayal, a crime against all of Russia. We will never allow anyone to divide Russia.”
“It is our country that is now at the forefront of building a fairer world order,” he said. “Without a sovereign and strong Russia, no lasting and stable international system is possible.”
“We know the threat we are opposing. Russophobia and other forms of racism and neo-Nazism have almost become the official ideology of Western ruling elites,” said Putin, who has given “denazification” of Ukraine as one reason for his invasion.
Putin also said the West “has no need” for Russia which “they want to dismember and plunder” and warned that if there is “outside interference or provocations to incite ethnic or religious conflict as acts of aggression against our country… we will respond accordingly.”
A nuclear threat has hovered over the war in Ukraine and Putin and the Kremlin have sent mixed messages about unconventional weapons, whose use are a regular talking point on Kremlin propaganda channels, especially if it is deemed that Russia faces an existential risk.
“The Russian world and Russia itself do not and cannot exist without Russians as an ethnicity, without the Russian people,” he added.
The World Russian People’s Council is marking the 30th anniversary of its founding with the aim of discussing Russia’s place in the world.
It is headed by the Patriarch of Moscow Kirill, who has faced condemnation from the global Orthodox Church for his support for Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine.
Putin addressed the church’s primate directly in his speech and praised his work “to bring about the spiritual revival of Russia,” which included a push for “family values” in which women would be encouraged to have more children to address the country’s demographic crisis.
Commenting on Putin’s speech, risk analyst Alex Kokcharev posted on X (formerly Twitter) a split image of the Russian president and a still from a film based on the George Orwell novel 1984.
“Strong 1984 vibes,” he wrote.”Putin delivered a speech in which he reiterated his vision for a ‘new world order’ in which Russia has the right to conquer all countries previously ruled by the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union.”
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday, in a ranting speech before a presidential election campaign, cast Moscow’s military action in Ukraine as an existential battle against purported attempts by the West to destroy Russia.
Putin, who has been in power for more than two decades and is the longest-serving Russian leader since Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, is expected to soon declare his intention to seek another six-year term in a presidential election next March.
“We are defending the security and well-being of our people, the highest, historical right to be Russia — a strong, independent power, a country-civilization,” Putin said, accusing the U.S. and its allies of trying to “dismember and plunder” Russia.
Ukraine and its Western allies have condemned the Russian action against Ukraine as an unprovoked act of aggression.
“We are now fighting for the freedom of not only Russia, but the whole world,” Putin said in a speech to participants of a meeting organized by the Russian Orthodox Church.
He denounced what he described as Western “Russophobia,” claiming that “our diversity and unity of cultures, traditions, languages, and ethnic groups simply don’t fit into the logic of Western racists and colonialists, into their cruel scheme of total depersonalization, disunity, suppression and exploitation.”
“If they can’t do it by force, they will try to sow strife,” he said, vowing to block “any outside interference, provocations with the aim of causing interethnic or interreligious conflicts as aggressive actions against our country, as an attempt to once again foment terrorism and extremism in Russia as a tool to fight us.”
Russian authorities have intensified their crackdown on dissent amid the fighting in Ukraine, arresting and imprisoning protesters and activists and silencing independent news outlets.
Putin said that the U.S.-dominated global order has become increasingly decrepit, declaring that “it is our country that is now at the forefront of creating a more equitable world order.”
“And I want to emphasize: without a sovereign, strong Russia, no lasting, stable world order is possible,” he said.
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