[Firestarter]

India is the Trump Organization's second-largest market outside of North America.
The Trump family has been intimately involved in all facets of some Indian projects, when government regulations threatened one deal; Donald Trump Jr. intervened directly with a high-level official. These deals produced royalties of up to $11 million between 2014 and 2017.

After winning the election in 2016, Trump refused to fully separate from the Trump Organization. He placed his holdings in a trust. Trump, who donates his presidential salary to support federal agencies, can withdraw money from the trust without the public’s knowledge.

In November 2016, a week after winning the election, Trump met with 3 Indian business partners – the brothers Chordia and their partner Kalpesh Mehta - at Trump Tower in New York.
See Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, Atul Chordia, Donald Trump, Sagar Chordia, Donald Trump Jr.


Trump’s subsidiaries for his business in India were incorporated through a third-party registration agent in Delaware — according to the Institute for Economic and Tax Policy a state that is an “onshore tax haven” and a “magnet” for anonymous shell companies. This structure makes it almost impossible to follow the flow of finances between the Trump Organization and its Indian partners.

Trump’s first major partner in India was Harresh Mehta (“Harresh bhai” or “Brother Harresh”), founder of Rohan, who has close connections to the most powerful elected officials in the state. Their partnership was arranged through Kalpesh Mehta (no relation to Harresh), then a graduate of the Wharton School, where Trump, Donald Jr., and Ivanka all received their undergraduate degrees.

After working for the Carlyle Group in New York, Kalpesh became a vice president in Lehman’s real estate private equity division in India.
In 2008, Mehta acquired the rights to one of Mumbai’s largest slum-redevelopment projects, in Golibar. The project was financed with $175 million from Lehman Brothers, arranged by Kalpesh, just before it went under.
In 2010, Kalpesh was hired by Brother Harresh, as director of Rohan Developers Private Limited and at least 3 other companies owned by the Mehta family.

The problem was that the 125-acre Golibar plot was home to 26,000 families.
So representatives of Rohan made threats to chase these poor families away.
The Panvalkars refused to leave, but then his family’s second-floor apartment was set on fire; according to Panvalkar: “Mehta wanted the building to be burned so we would be forced to vacate”.

Through illegal permits, Rohan could begin work on one-half of the plot.
After their permits were refused, Donald Jr., Harresh Mehta, and Kalpesh Mehta met with Prithviraj Chavan to lobby for the Trump Tower project, but Chavan refused to grant them a “special concession” to approve something “blatantly illegal”.

In January 2018, Mehta launched another Trump project in India, in Gurgaon, in partnership with Basant Bansal.
The Bansal family were accused of tax evasion in 2008 and in 2011, after a lavish $20 million wedding party Basant Bansal held for his daughter on a Turkish island, evidence was found that the Bansals were hiding some $70 million. The Trumps obviously didn’t mind.
Since 2014, following Modi’s election, the Bansals were part of Modi’s official business trips to Russia and Japan.

In April 2012, Donald Jr. travelled to Pune for another brand-licensing deal, for twin residential Trump Towers, with Panchshil Realty of the brothers Atul and Sagar Chordia. The Chordia brothers are closely tied to Sharad Pawar, a powerful politician in India, president of the Nationalist Congress Party (his daughter, Supriya Sule, owns stake in Panchshil).

In September 2013, another Trump project in India was launched with one of India’s wealthiest men, Mangal Prabhat Lodha, founder of the Lodha Group.
In 2015, the Lodha Group had nearly 80 subsidiaries and associates in India and offshore holdings in Jersey, Mauritius, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. In February 2018, the investigation into money-laundering was closed, because they “did not find anything suspicious”.

According to Rep. Gerry Connolly:

What you’re looking at — especially in India where he has extensive holdings — is more than problematic. It raises very serious conflicts of interest questions. The fact that his two sons run the day-to-day operations of the business that hardly separates it from him politically or financially.

Trump-branded projects in Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Panama have also shown that Trump partnered with businesses with ties to criminal activity: http://archive.is/0f0WQ