Page:House-Intel-Glenn-Simpson-Transcript.pdf/95

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UNCLASSIFIED, COMMITTEE SENSITIVE
95

we've seen is that it was 10 million, and I think it came from the Agalarovs. So that was one.

There's the Trump vodka business that was earlier. And then ultimately, you know, what we came to realize was that the money was actually coming out of Russia and going into his properties in Florida and New York and Panama and Toronto and these other places.

And what we, you know, gradually begun to understand, which, you know, I suppose I should kick myself for not figuring out earlier, but I don't know that much about the real estate business, which is I alluded to this earlier, so, you know, by 2003, 2004, Donald Trump was not able to get bank credit for -- and if you're a real estate developer and you can't get bank loans, you know, you've got a problem.

And all these guys, they used leverage like, you know -- so there's alternative systems of financing, and sometimes it's -- well, there's a variety of alternative systems of financing. But in any case, you need alternative financing.

One of the things that we now know about how the condo projects were financed is that you have to -- you can get credit if you can show that you've sold a certain number of units.

So it turns out that, you know, one of the most important things to look at is -- this is especially true of the early overseas developments, like Toronto and Panama -- you can get credit if you can show that you sold a certain percentage of your units.

And so the real trick is to get people who say they've bought those units, and that's where the Russians are to be found, is in some of those pre-sales, is what they're called. And that's how, for instance, in Panama they got the credit

UNCLASSIFIED, COMMITTEE SENSITIVE