Ivanka, the Fraudster and the Panama Hotel That Made Trump RichIvanka worked with a Soviet-connected salesman to sell hotel units. He fled. Trump got rich. Where are they now?Reuters Nov 19, 2017 3:54 PM
https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/1.823393In the spring of 2007, a succession of foreigners, many from Russia, arrived at Panama City airport to be greeted by a chauffeur who whisked them off in a white Cadillac with a Donald Trump logo on the side.
The limousine belonged to a business run by a Brazilian former car salesman named Alexandre Ventura Nogueira, who was offering the visitors a chance to invest in Trump's latest project - a 70-floor tower called the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower. It was the future U.S. president's first international hotel venture, a complex including residential apartments and a casino in a waterfront building shaped like a sail.
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One of those Nogueira set out to impress was Ivanka, Trump's daughter. In an interview with Reuters, Nogueira said he met and spoke with Ivanka "many times" when she was handling the Trump Organization's involvement in the Panama development. "She would remember me," he said.
Ivanka was so taken with his sales skills, Nogueira said, that she helped him become a leading broker for the development and he appeared in a video with her promoting the project.
A Reuters investigation into the financing of the Trump Ocean Club, in conjunction with the American broadcaster NBC News, found Nogueira was responsible for between one-third and one-half of advance sales for the project. It also found he did business with a Colombian who was later convicted of money laundering and is now in detention in the United States; a Russian investor in the Trump project who was jailed in Israel in the 1990s for kidnap and threats to kill; and a Ukrainian investor who was arrested for alleged people-smuggling while working with Nogueira and later convicted by a Kiev court.
Three years after getting involved in the Trump Ocean Club, Nogueira was arrested by Panamanian authorities on charges of fraud and forgery, unrelated to the Trump project. Released on $1.4 million bail, he later fled the country.
He left behind a trail of people who claim he cheated them, including over apartments in the Trump project, resulting in at least four criminal cases that eight years later have still to be judged.
Nogueira, 43, denies the charges and told Reuters in an email: "I am no Angel but not Devil either."
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