A murdered journalist, an organized crime racket, and an alleged scheme to siphon off tens of millions of dollars: These all appear in a new report about a Trump Tower rising in the Caucasus.
The Daily Beast on Friday revealed the dark and tangled history behind a 70-story skyscraper President Donald Trump's sons are building with a company co-owned by an oligarch.
"The president’s sons are trumpeting a new Trump Tower — but not the Moscow oligarch behind one of the companies they named in the deal," wrote the Beast reporter Will Neal. "[That oligarch] has shady ties to Russia."
The development in question is Trump Tower Tbilisi, of which Eric Trump, 42, shared an AI rendering in May with the gushing comment that it "marks our first project in the region."
A joint investigation by The Daily Beast, PunchUp and The Newsground reported one of the groups named on the project, Biograpi Living, is co-owned by Paata Gamgoneishvili — the oligarch in question.
Biograpi Living now insists it has nothing to do with the deal, despite being featured prominently in the Trumps' own announcement.
The White House denied the report had anything to do with Trump
“This has nothing to do with the president,” spokeswoman Anna Kelly told the Beast, "whose investment holdings are held in fully discretionary accounts managed by independent third-party financial institutions."
That didn't stop the Beast from digging into Gamgoneishvili's past.
Among the startling narratives revealed in the report is the brutal rape and murder of Bulgarian television journalist Viktoria Marinova.
"Investigative outlet Bivol tied Gamgoneishvili and Isaev in 2019 to the network behind an alleged scheme that siphoned tens of millions of dollars out of the Bulgarian arm of Russian oil giant Lukoil," the Beast reported.
"The year before, a TV journalist who had hosted Bivol’s reporters for a segment about the wider scandal was found murdered. Authorities said her killing was not connected to her work—a conclusion Bivol’s editor disputed."
The Beast also tied Gamgoneishvili, a Moscow trader during the Soviet Union's collapse, to Boris Yeltsin, the former President of Russia.
"Gamgoneishvili backed the then-president through a union of Afghan war veterans and was handed a state medal for it," the Beast reported.
"Yeltsin rewarded the veterans movement with lucrative import perks, and parts of it later curdled into an organized crime racket. Gamgoneishvili ran his own trading business under the union’s wing and rode the same wave to a shopping mall fortune.
"Two of his Moscow malls alone sold to an Austrian fund for around $230 million in 2006."