Deutsche Bank is investigating the longtime personal banker of Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner over her purchase of a flat in New York from a company partly owned by Kushner, according to two news reports.
The connection emerged in personal financial disclosures filed recently by Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump, who hold jobs as White House senior advisers.
Banker Rosemary Vrablic and two colleagues bought a flat in Park Avenue, Manhattan, for about $1.5m (about £1.27m in 2020 terms) in 2013 from Bergel 715 Associates, The New York Times first reported on Sunday. It was sold two years later for $1.85m (about £1.54m in 2020 terms).
Trump’s daughter and her husband received $1m to $5m from Bergel 715 in 2019, according to the couple’s required financial disclosures, which they filed on Friday. It was the first time Bergel 715 had appeared in their filings.
A source familiar with the business arrangement told the New York Times that Kushner owns a stake in Bergel 715, and did so when Vrablic bought the flat. But the income reported from Bergel 715 was not linked to the banker’s purchase, according to the source.
The Deutsche Bank investigation will determine if Vrablic acted improperly by buying the property, according to The Hill. It’s typically against policy at banks for employees to do business – other than banking – with clients to avoid conflicts of interest, the Times noted.
“The bank will closely examine the information that came to light on Friday and the [facts] from 2013,” bank spokesperson Daniel Hunter said in a statement.
Kushner and Donald Trump were Vrablic’s clients when the banker bought the flat. Kushner introduced Vrablic to the future US president in 2011 when Trump was having a hard time finding a bank that would loan him money after his repeated bankruptcies and loan defaults, including one to Deutsche Bank, the New York Times noted.
By 2013, the men had received about $190m (about £161m in 2020 terms) in Deutsche Bank loans with Vrablic’s help – and hundreds of millions after that, according to the New York Times.
Trump borrowed $175m (£151m in 2020) for his Trump National Doral golf resort in Florida, and for the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago in 2012. The bank later financed the Trump International Hotel in Washington, the New York Times reported.
Deutsche Bank is Trump’s biggest creditor. It has loaned the Trump Organisation some $2bn (£1.54m) since 1998, and there are currently an estimated $350m (£269m) in loans outstanding, according to the New York Times. The loans are reportedly backed by a personal guarantee from Trump himself.
Christopher Smith, the general counsel for Kushner’s family firm Kushner Companies, told The Hill in a statement: “Kushner is not the managing partner of that entity and has no involvement with the sales of the apartments.”
It’s not clear how large a stake Kushner holds in the company.
Vrablic could not be reached for comment.
Deutsche Bank was fined a total of $630m in 2017 in the US and Britain over a $10bn Russian money-laundering scheme. It was recently hit with a $150m penalty for the bank’s lack of oversight in dealings with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The US Department of Justice last year launched another probe into Deutsche Bank’s compliance with regulations to prevent money laundering. The investigation included a review of suspicious activity, including some linked to Kushner, sources told the New York Times. Amid the probe, the president’s Trump Organisation was reportedly pressing to postpone its bank loan payments.
The sticky situation underscored the unique power of Trump as president to manoeuvre a deal for his business, particularly with a bank under investigation by his own administration.
David Enrich, a New York Times business reporter who recently wrote a book on Deutsche Bank, Dark Towers, told NPR the bank has been “worried” about a situation like this.
Bank officials are now “forced to choose between doing what seems like it’s financially right for the bank and for its regulators, versus doing what’s right to protect the relationship with someone who has the ability to inflict enormous damage on the institution if he is so inclined,” Enrich explained.
The scenario is the “absolute nightmare that someone (ahem) warned about” when Trump took office, Walter Shaub, the former head of the US Office of Government Ethics under both Barack Obama and Trump, tweeted.
Trump did not divest from his businesses when he moved into the White House as other presidents have done to avoid conflicts of interest.