ON a remote site at the edge of the Gulf of Oman, thousands of migrant workers from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan are at work in 40°C heat, toiling in shifts from dawn until nightfall to build a new city, a multibillion-dollar project backed by Oman’s oil-rich government that has an unusual partner: former US President Donald Trump.
Trump’s name is plastered on signs at the entrance of the project and in the lobby of the InterContinental Hotel in Muscat, the nearby capital of Oman, where a team of sales agents is invoking his name to help sell luxury villas at prices of up to US$13mil, mostly targeting super-rich buyers from around the world, including from Russia, Iran and India.
Trump has been selling his name to global real estate developers for more than a decade.
But the Oman deal has taken his financial stake in one of the world’s most strategically important and volatile regions to a new level, underscoring how his business and his politics intersect as he runs for president again amid intensifying legal and ethical troubles.
Interviews and an examination by The New York Times of hundreds of pages of financial documents associated with the Oman project show that this partnership is unlike any other international deal Trump and his family have signed.
> The venture puts Trump in business with the government of Oman, an ally of the United States with which Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, cultivated ties while in office and which plays a vital diplomatic role in a volatile region. The Omani government is providing the land for the development, is investing heavily in the infrastructure to support it and will get a cut of the profits in the long run.
> Trump was brought into the deal by a Saudi real estate firm, Dar Al Arkan, which is closely intertwined with the Saudi government. While in office, Trump developed a tight relationship with Saudi leaders. Since leaving office, he has worked with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund to host the LIV Golf tour and Kushner, received a US$2bil infusion from the Saudi fund for his investment venture.
> Trump’s company, the Trump Organisation, has already brought in at least US$5mil from the Oman deal. Under its terms, Trump Organisation will not put up any money for the development, but will help design a Trump-branded hotel, golf course and golf club and will be paid to manage them for up to 30 years, among other revenue.
> The project could also draw scrutiny in the West for its treatment of its migrant workers, who during the first phase of construction are living in compounds of cramped trailers in a desert-like setting and are being paid as little as US$340 a month, according to one of the engineers supervising the work.
Trump’s business ties in the Middle East have already been under intense scrutiny. Federal prosecutors who brought criminal charges against him in the case stemming from his mishandling of classified documents issued subpoenas for information about his foreign deals and the agreements with the Saudi-backed LIV Golf tour.
During his presidency, Trump’s family business profited directly from money spent at his Washington hotel by foreign governments, including Saudi Arabia, just one example of what ethics experts cited as real or perceived conflicts of interest during his administration.
Trump’s stake in the project in Oman as he runs for president again only focuses more attention on whether and how his own financial interests could influence foreign policy were he to return to the White House.
“This is as blatant as it comes,” said Virginia Canter, the chief ethics counsel to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a non-profit group that has investigated Trump’s foreign deals. “How and when is he going to sell out US interests? That is the question this creates. It is the kind of corruption our Founding Fathers most worried about.”
In February, Eric Trump, the former president’s son who is overseeing the project for Trump Organisation while also playing a role in his father’s reelection campaign, travelled to Oman to visit the cliff-side site where the golf course will soon be built. He met with executives from Dar Al Arkan, the Saudi firm, as well as top government officials from Oman who control the land.
“It’s like the Hamptons of the Middle East,” Eric Trump said in an interview, declining to address other questions about the project.
Oman, in fact, is nothing like the Hamptons. It is a Muslim nation and absolute monarchy, ruled by a sultan, who plays a sensitive role in the Middle East: Oman maintains close ties with Saudi Arabia and its allies, but also with Iran, with which it has considerable trade.
As a result, Oman has often served as an interlocutor for the West with Iran, including in the lead-up to the 2015 agreement the Obama administration and other Western governments negotiated with Iran to slow its move to build nuclear weapons, a deal Donald Trump later abandoned.
In recent months, Oman has hosted indirect talks to try to ease tensions between Iran and the United States.
Oman is also a buyer of weapons from the United States, including Lockheed Martin’s F-16 fighter jets and a Raytheon-manufactured missile system that it agreed to purchase last year.
Trump, while at the White House, had sent Kushner to Oman in 2019 to meet with Sultan Qaboos bin Said, then the nation’s monarch, to discuss the Arab-Israeli dispute.
He later reached out to Haitham bin Tariq Al Said, who took over as the new sultan in 2020, to praise “the success of the first eight months” of his rule and to discuss ways to “strengthen the Oman-US bilateral economic partnership”, according to a White House summary of the call.
Trump did not pursue any new international real estate deals while in office, but his search for deep-pocketed international partners picked up when he left the White House in January 2021, his reputation at home tarnished by the Jan 6, 2021, assault on the US Capitol.
And it was through Dar Al Arkan, the Saudi real estate company, that Trump and his family firm got into the Oman project.
Trump was on hand to close the deal in New York in November, just before he announced his 2024 presidential bid.
Executives from the Saudi real estate company visited Trump Tower and showed off designs for the project, and Eric Trump signed paperwork confirming the deal.
“Our partnership with Trump will distinguish our first project in Oman and put it on the global map,” Yousef Al Shelash, the chair of Dar Al Arkan, said in a statement issued as the deal was signed.
Neither Dar Al Arkan nor the Trump Organisation would say how much the Trump family would be paid.
In previous international deals, the family has traditionally taken a fee in exchange for the use of its name, a separate fee to manage the hotel and golf properties, and a percentage of the profits on the sale of Trump-branded villas, if the prices hit a goal.
The Trump-branded project is being built just above the seaside village of Yiti, where there are now more donkeys, goats and stray cats in the streets than people, as many have moved away as the construction projects have accelerated.
The few remaining residents do not know a great deal about Donald Trump, having only a general impression of him as a rich businessman and politician.
Htim Talbi, whose family has lived in Yiti for six decades and remains in one of the few occupied homes in the dusty town, said he harboured a far-off dream that he might somehow afford one of the luxury town houses.
“Trump – he is your king from America,” Talbi said, after inviting a visitor to his village inside to an air-conditioned room to sit on the floor and share a pot of tea.
“Welcome to Oman.” — ©2023 The New York Times Company
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