Trump Jr. Now Tied To Banker Behind Russian Money Laundering Scheme
Donald Trump Jr. has a direct, personal connection to the central figure in multiple money laundering cases involving Russia, Latvia, Ukraine, UK, Seychelles Islands, New Zealand, Vanuatu, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico and the United States.
Donald Trump Jr. gave a paid speech to Baltic International Bank’s annual conference in 2012 and now he’s blocking people on Twitter who discuss the trip — and his meeting in Riga with its founder — the controversial Latvian banker and former-British football club executive Valērijs Belokoņs aka Valeri Belokon.
Baltic International Bank has branches in Moscow, Latvia, Ukraine and London.
Trump Jr.’s hyper-active Twitter blocking led me to dig deeper into his contact at Baltic International Bank (BIB), and when the Democratic Coalition’s senior advisor Scott Dworkin found a series of #TrumpLeaks photos of Trump Jr. on the bank’s website we both believed there was more to the story. He said:
“Don Jr. is looking for an easy out. He met one on one with the head of a bank that was actively running a scam to launder money for mexican drug lords. When confronted with hard evidence, he didn’t deny or clarify, he ran away and hid like a coward.”
It turns out that Baltic International Bank has been named as a Mexican cartel money laundering agent, is subject of a criminal inquiry in another former Soviet state Kyrgyzstan, plus Valeri Belokon’s partners in Blackpool F.C. accuse the banker of pumping dirty cash into their one-time English Premier League football club.
I suppose that is why Donald Trump Jr. blocked me on Twitter as well, after writing this story about his meeting with said Latvian banker.
Belokon’s Baltic International Bank wrote a money laundering manual, and got caught last year, and fined because of the OOCRP’s reporting.
Just like the Mediterranean island of Cyprus who shares a religion with Russia — and where Democratic Congressional investigators visited investigating Trump related money laundering — Latvia’s cultural and language ties has enabled it too, to become an EU hotspot for Russian money laundering.
Even Deutche Bank — recently cited in the $10 billion dollar mirror trading money laundering scam — has cut off most Latvian banks from dollar based transactions, as foreign cash pours into the tiny nation.
BIB even posted new photos to congratulate Donald Trump on winning America’s presidency on November 9th, 2016.
And they show Trump Jr. meeting with Belokon.
One on one.
The Trump Organization made Latvian headlines in 2011 when it entered into discussions about funding a major concert hall.
Then Latvian media reported in 2012 that Trump Jr. was mainly interested in building a concert hall venue in Riga.
After last year’s election, a Latvian news website wrote a follow up story — which the source of the cover image of this story — showing a meeting between the two men, Trump Jr. and Belokon, looking rather pleased in a posed action photo, as well as the two images below.
Latvian media made no mention of this meeting, nor did a subsequent video where Trump Jr. claimed to have lots of Russian business ties — which has still somehow evaded numerous media reports about the family’s business.
EXIF data from the above photos dates the images from the same time as Trump Jr.’s public speech in 2012 to the Latvian bank conference.
Trump Jr. himself said it was mostly a networking opportunity and never publicly mentioned meeting the owner of the bank.
He even met with the concert hall project promoters again — making local headlines — but it would it would be the final media mention of the Trump Organization’s interest in the project.
Trump Jr. Has Good Reason To Fear Being Associated With Belokon And BIB
Belokon’s Baltic International Bank also was caught laundering $860 million dollars in Mexican cartel money in 2011, from a company named Tormex — a phantom company in New Zealand — into the now-defunct US bank Wachovia.
The money laundering scam reached from Mexico to Latvia through Russia and to the remote Seychells Islands and Vanautu in the South Pacific to New Zealand. Ukrainian companies were used to generate fake invoices and contracts.
In the end, Wachovia was caught handling over $350 billion dollars in Mexican cash transactions without money laundering controls by the federal Drug Enforcement Agency, before failing and being acquired by Wells Fargo.
Australia’s financial intelligence agency AUSTRAC published a complete case study with the succinct diagram you see on the left explaining exactly how Sinaloa cartel money found its way to Latvia.
Notably, the Latvian bank’s ties to Mexican drug cartels were publicly established before Trump Jr. met with Valeri Belokon at Baltic International Bank the following year.
Belokon’s British Football Dealings Sunk By Former Soviet State Money Laundering Problems
Valeri Belokon is also involved in a series of high-stakes lawsuits over British football club Blackpool FC.
Belokon’s Latvian bank was involved with another bank he set up in the former Soviet state of Kyrgyzstan.
The two issues have become linked as Belokon’s British partners accused the Latvian of pumping laundered money into Blackpool FC’s books after buying a minority stake in the club and spending big bucks on player acquisitions.
Blackpool FC formally suspended Valeri Belokon this March after a Paris court found that his Latvian bank and his Kyrgyzstani Manas Bank, were both involved in large scale money laundering — an accusation which he of course denies.
The Paris Court overturned a lower court ruling against Kyrgyzstan which called their shutdown and seizure of Manas Bank an illegal taking, in light of the new evidence of money laundering practices from Latvian bank regulators.
The Court also found that Belokon’s Manas Bank engaged in a greater volume of transactions than that of the entire GDP for the country of Kyrgyzstan:
The Court gave weight to the data from the experts’ reports regarding the amount of transactions that Manas Bank operated. The Cour d’Appel noted that it had considerably exceeded the GDP of Kyrgyzstan in 2008, which could not be explained by the ordinary banking practices in a country with such poor economic conditions as in the Kyrgyz Republic.
Just last month, Kyrgyzstan hit Belokon with a criminal 20-year money laundering sentence after a trial in absentia last month. However, because of the lack of due process, the verdict isn’t enforceable in European jurisdictions.
After Belokon’s big cash investments into Blackpool’s soccer team in 2010 — and management as club President — the small town soccer club made an astronomical rise to enter the English Premier League — the world’s most watched football league — which led to a windfall of television money.
Belokon wound up suing his partners for unfair practices by refusing to pay him profit sharing based upon his return on investment for elevating the club out of the 3rd rate league, and for making loans to the club. Belkon won a cash verdict in the first major case earlier this year.
Blackpool FC has fallen all the way to British football’s 4th division today.
Meanwhile, there’s second civil case against Blackpool F.C.’s owners by Belokon that is being tried in London right now, in what’s being called one of the most expensive cases in British football history.
If the money laundering Latvian bank hadn’t celebrated Donald Trump’s improbable election, we might never have known his son met with a money laundering banker for cartels and Russians so daring, that he marched openly into the world of international sport and started spreading cash everywhere.
I first reported Trump Jr.’s trip to Latvia last October based on the Democratic Coalition’s research, but then only for its significance about his video confession to “lots of Russian business ties” when his father denied having Russian business ties.
We know that was a big fat lie.
Trump Jr.’s ties are President Trump’s ties since the younger is merely an agent of the Trump Organization family business — which is wholly owned by Donald Trump Sr.
If Donald Trump Jr. hadn’t blocked myself and Scott Dworkin, we might’ve never known to follow up on the post-election blog posts about this meeting.
“Blocking people on Twitter for asking questions isn’t leadership,” Dworkin told me in disgust about the President and his sons new penchant for running away from problems.
“It’s un-American.”
Here are the rest of the photos from Trump Jr.’s appearance at Baltic International Bank’s annual conference:
