How did Jared Kushner get $2 billion from the Saudis?

So no wrong doing? No laws broken?
There is a lot post on This board accusing Kushner of selling info to ME companies/countries.. and I wouldnt be overly surprised.. but is there any proof? Did he drop off a laptop with incriminating photos and info on it and forget about it?

 

and the arab league will be inclined to do business with companies that will benefit their members, and we know that graft is ripe in those supply chains even when administered by the Arab league. jmo, good time to have an inside with the ME power brokers who will be supplying the money. If a VE can't make a nice profit in that environment, well....

 

While the transaction was legal it was also clearly questionable ethically. It was essentially a bribe paid to the then president's son-in-law who was also one of his principle advisors. In 2017 the Trump Administration accused Qatar of supporting terrorism. After the Kushner Companies received the bailout Qatar was no longer considered a supporter of terrorism. You think there was a link?
2017
Trump: Qatar must stop funding terrorism
March 2018
Kushner Companies confirms meeting with Qatar on financing
April 2018
Trump praises Qatar's efforts on combating terrorist financing

 

So your assertion is that a Canadian, publicly traded company at the time, was essentially run by the Qataris and that the company management were OK with paying a bribe to the son in law of the American President?

You have also suggested in the past that Kushner has done something illegal or unethical in taking money from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. Do you think that standard should have applied to the Clinton's and the Clinton Global Initiative taking donations from foreign countries?

If we need to pass a law that states that people that have worked for the US government at certain levels are required to have a cooling off period of several year, similar to what the DoD has, I would be OK with that. I just find it interesting that Kushner is doing something very similar to what the Clinton's did after Bill left office but he is the only one being accused of doing something untoward.

 

Who would you prefer be the ones that run the reconstruction?

 

yes. the standard should apply to both situations. both are wrong. both slush funds to reward friends of those in power

 

What is the standard?

 

don't have a better option. it would be great if maybe 80% of every dollar was properly used instead of maybe 50% with all the corruption but still better than the 5% that assad was sharing.

my point is that if Jared can't invest and turn a profit in that environment with that kind of slush washing around and those built in tribal connections, then he isn't going to turn a profit anywhere. which is his record to date.

 

don't take massive amounts of foreign money while in or intending to run for office. I guess we all have our own expectations

should potus be held to the Emoluments clause? hawking shoes, perfumes, soaps, crypto?

holding properties in foreign countries (trump tower Istanbul, Qatar)?

be renting space in domestic owned buildings to chinese national companies ?

 

Is that written into law anywhere? Or are these just norms that you think should be adhered to?

 

How do you know he has not turned a profit? Are you an investor?

I do not like defending Kushner but I find the the level of hate for him after he achieved one of the biggest foreign policy achievements in the Middle East in the last 40 years very strange. I did not see anyone complaining about Madelyn Albright establishing the Albright Capital Management after she left government service.

 

The only money made thus far has been the fees charged by Kushner.

Affinity Partners - Wikipedia


Officials who head the Public Investment Fund objected to investing in Kushner's firm, but Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman overruled those officials.[4]

The firm has a staff of approximately 20 people.[5]By 2024, the firm had returned no profits to its investors.[6]

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/us/politics/kushner-private-equity-saudi-arabia.html


The private equity firm run by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of former President Donald J. Trump, has been paid at least $112 million in fees since 2021 by Saudi Arabia and other foreign investors, even though as of July it had not yet returned any profits to the governments largely bankrolling the firm.

Those are among the findings of a Senate Finance Committee inquiry into the operations of Affinity Partners, the Miami-based firm Mr. Kushner set up.

 

Do you have a copy of the prospectus? Were investors promised profits being returned to them in the first three years of the fund? I'm open to believing that but I need to see if from an unbiased source or an actual investor in the fund. Almost every piece of data about the firm that is in there is based from Democrats in Congress.

This is from the NYTimes article you linked on how funds like these typically work:
Data assembled by PitchBook, a private equity industry research firm, found that profit distributions are most common during a fund’s sixth and seventh years and Affinity has not reached this point. But PitchBook also found that most private equity firms started to pay at least some profits within 2.5 years.

Private equity firms like Affinity raise money from investors, then reinvest that capital into small, often not-yet-public companies they believe have a good chance to grow quickly or be run more efficiently. The hope is that those bets will generate enough return to eventually pay back the original investors with profits that far exceed the management fees.

 

because it has been widely published and I saw it on too hot...

collected over $157M in fees to date but has not distributed a single cent to the investors in 5 years.
Jared Kushner’s private equity firm faces inquiry as it fails to return profits | US news | The Guardian

Kushner’s Fund Has Reaped Millions in Fees, but So Far Returned No Profits - The New York Times
A private equity firm owned by Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, has been paid $157m in fees since 2021 without returning any profit to investors, according to a US Senate inquiry.

The finding from the Senate finance committee has fuelled suspicions that the Miami-based company, Affinity Partners, may be a foreign influence-buying operation established in anticipation of the former president returning to the White House.

The inquiry was launched by the Democrat-led Senate finance committee in response to reports in the New York Times that Kushner was pursuing property deals abroad as his father-in-law was embroiled in a presidential election campaign.

Kushner fund collects its fees, yet yields no profits - Northwest

The private equity firm run by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of former President Donald Trump, has been paid at least $112 million in fees since 2021 by Saudi Arabia and other foreign investors, even though as of July it had not yet returned any profits to the governments largely bankrolling the firm.

Those are among the findings of a Senate Finance Committee inquiry into the operations of Affinity Partners, the Miami-based firm set up by Kushner, also a former Trump administration adviser.

The committee opened an investigation last spring in response to reporting in The New York Times examining the firm’s first three years of work.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the committee’s chair, said the new information had only deepened his concerns that Kushner’s firm creates conflicts of interest, particularly with Trump running for reelection.

Wyden asked why Affinity Partners had not “distributed a penny of earnings back to clients,” and suggested that perhaps it was set up primarily as a way for foreign entities to pay the Kushners rather than a typical fund in which partners reap the returns of deployed capital.

what foreign policy objective did he achieve? KSA and Israeli economies have become well entangled long before Kushner did anything. they were well on their way to normalizing economic relations before djt was ever elected.

crediting kushner with papering that is like crediting djt with getting rid of assad or driving Iran into a hole. Putin/Russia are on the ropes and will have to take a deal much worse than what they want. djt will take credit for that too, even though it was others, who in spite of djt, have managed to force russia into a position of weakness at the bargainaign table.

 

I have not seen anything that says they have not turned a profit. It just says they have not returned any profits to investors. If you have seen something else, please post it. Assuming that they are taking 2% management fees, they could have keep most of the money the have raised but not invested in T-Bills and still turned a profit.

The Abraham Accords is a pretty big one. The CW for the FP crowd was that you need to have a two state solution before you could move forward with normalization of relations between Israel and the Sunni states. John Kerry has been a very big proponent of that. The Trump Admin was the first one that realized the time was right with the Sunni states to make a deal with Israel so they could all work together to contain Iran and its proxies and they could not longer wait on the Palestinians.

 

I’m just posting publicly available data. I don’t feel the need to provide cover for Kushner.

 

Do you know any serious investors who drop $2B and are okay with no profits returned over 5 years? Not a big PE guy but that is out of line with my limited experience and apparently we'll out of industry norms

 

So if you know the publicly available data says that Kushner should not likely have to return profits to investors at this point, why is it an issue?

I think that Democrats are trying to sell the idea that Kushner is doing something illegal or unethical by using the public's lack of knowledge about how funds like this are actually run. Investors in these funds know what they are getting into and are told ahead of time in the prospectus when the fund will start to return profits to them. The article you shared from the NYTimes actually discussed this and states that most of these funds do not return profits to investors for several years with most of it coming in later years. However Democrats in both the House and Senate are playing up the fact that since no profits have been returned to investors, the fund is losing money somehow or this was really just a way for Arabs to bribe Kushner or Trump.

Kushner is going to be going into year 4 this year. I think we'll actually find out if the fund is profitable or not by the end of this year.

 

Didn't KSA just inject $2B into LIV Golf? You think that is going to turn a profit in under 5 years?