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Tyson Foods Faces Boycott After Firing 1,200 Americans, ‘Would Like to Employ’ 42,000 Migrants - AND BIDEN - MAYORKAS - SCHUMER HAVE USHERED OVER THE BORDER 15 MILLION TO PICK FROM.
Donald Trump's golf resorts lose a lot of money. According to a bombshell New York Times report published last year, the 15 courses he owns around the world have lost over $315 million over the past 20 years. The interesting question is why does Trump hang on to so many money-losing enterprises?
No one's quite sure how much he's worth. No one's sure why the self-styled "king of debt" decided to plow up to $400 million into his two Scottish golf resorts. And no one's sure what his tax returns might turn up.
But because the United Kingdom has a registry of companies that requires them to publicly file accounts every year, we can look in detail at how much his two courses in Scotland lose every year and how much debt they've racked up. (Hint: It's a lot.)
So why do Trump and his sons, who ran his businesses while he was president, continue to run courses that lose so much money?
We spoke to leading experts, examined the financial data, and looked back at Trump's own words on the matter to find out why.
Insider contacted the Trump Organization for comment but did not receive a reply.
Trump's losses aren't 'normal'
Trump has two golf resorts in Scotland. He opened the first, Trump International Golf Links, in Aberdeenshire in 2012 on a piece of land he had purchased six years before. The course has lost money every year since.
Company accounts for 2019 - which covered the period before COVID-19 wreaked havoc on many businesses - showed that Trump International Golf Club Scotland Limited, which owns the course, posted an annual loss of $1.5 million. The total debt on the resort is more than $60 million, the balance sheet showed.
The second course is Turnberry, the crown jewel of his global golf empire. He paid $60 million in 2014 for the storied resort, where Tom Watson famously scraped out a win over Jack Nicklaus at the 1977 Open Championship.
Trump claimed to have spent a further $150 million on its lavish refurbishment. Turnberry's parent company, Golf Recreation Scotland, posted a $3.25 million loss on revenue of $26 million in 2019 and owes nearly $160 million to its creditors, the balance sheet showed.
Such losses are not unprecedented in the industry. Running a golf resort profitably is hard to do, said Larry Hirsh, the president of Golf Property Analysts, which values and markets golf properties.
"Over the last 10 to 20 years, golf courses have had their challenges," Hirsh told Insider.
"It costs a lot to go play, and Trump has never been shy about pricing his properties. Certainly, golf has experienced over the last 15 or 20 years a decline in participation," he said.
However, he added that "it's certainly not the idea" for major golf courses to lose money. "I don't think it's normal," he said.
Trump said his golf courses were 'not really golf investments'
Trump said in a 2016 interview with Reuters that people looking at the massive losses at his golf resorts were missing the point.
He said his resorts were "not really golf investments" but real-estate "development deals."
"It's pretty simple," he said. "My golf holdings are really investments in thousands, many thousands of housing units and hotels. At some point the company will do them. Hopefully, I won't because I will be president, but we're in no rush to do them."
There's just one problem with those claims: Trump hasn't built a single residential property on any golf resort he owns in the past decade, in Europe or the United States, Reuters reported last year.
He secured provisional permission in 2008 to build about 1,500 luxury homes and a hotel on farmland surrounding the Aberdeenshire estate, in what the Trump Organization had billed as the "world's greatest golf course." The economic gains would outweigh the environmental impact of the building work, officials said. But neither the houses nor the hotel materialized.
In 2019, he secured approval for a reworked plan to build 500 homes, but construction hasn't started.
At Turnberry, Trump failed to secure permission to develop hundreds of houses on the adjoining land. He had boasted to Reuters that he "would have the right to build at least a thousand houses on Turnberry, if I wanted to." But Scottish planners had different ideas. In 2019, the local authority rejected plans to develop the land, The Scotsman reported.
The ruling said the development could "negatively affect" Turnberry's status as an iconic resort. It suggests that Trump's plan to build houses on his golf resorts may be unsound from a business perspective.
That brings us to the second theory: incompetence.
Is it simply incompetence?
"Stupidity and grandiosity should never be overlooked as possible grounds for all of this," said Daniel Shaviro, the Wayne Perry Professor of Taxation at New York University Law School, who wrote about Trump's tax returns last year.
Trump's patchy business record is well documented. He demonstrated a genius for self-marketing and licensed his name to resorts and luxury developments all over the world, propelling him to the White House. But his businesses have also filed for bankruptcy six times, and he counts dozens of hugely expensive failures among his successful business ventures.
The accounts for Turnberry and Trump Links suggest they may be two further examples of poorly run businesses. A detailed analysis of Trump's two courses by Behind the Balance Sheet, a financial research consultancy, illustrated that profits had been consistently lower than at other established rivals in Scotland, including Loch Lomond Golf Club and Gleneagles, and that capital expenditure had consistently outstripped revenue growth at both resorts.
All in all, it's difficult to see how either business would ever generate a positive return on Trump's huge initial investment.
Are they being kept for 'fishy' tax purposes?
Companies House accounts showed that Golf Recreation Scotland, Turnberry's parent company, depends on an eye-watering amount of debt - around $160 million - owed to its parent company, the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, which is registered in New York.
Trump International Golf Club Scotland, which controls Trump's Aberdeenshire resort, owed Trump more than $55 million, and nearly $5 million to its parent company, DJT Holdings.
"Under US tax law, you can't really have an interest-free loan between related parties," he said.
"There would be a tendency to impute the market interest rate, or else they say it's really equity.
"So when separate tax entities are engaged in transactions, the idea is that it's got to be arm's length, it's got to reflect reality."
Shaviro said it wasn't clear there was any tax benefit to the way Trump had set up the loans.
"I don't see the obvious tax benefits here," he said. "Whether it's money-laundering or playing games with lenders, there is a pretty good guess something is going on, but I'm not sure exactly what it would be."
That brings us to the last theory.
Trump's 'unexplained' funding for his golf courses
Harvie, a member of Scottish Parliament, said in February: "The purchases in Scotland were part of a very long spending spree, with his spokespeople claiming that he had vast sums of money sitting around and available for investment even though, at the same time, he was apparently being turned down for credit."
Trump, who once called himself the "king of debt," had spent his career building businesses on other people's borrowed money, even bragging about it on the campaign trail in 2016.
He began that spending spree in 2006, buying up more than $400 million worth of properties in cash over the next decade, The Washington Post reported in 2018. The first purchase was his Balmedie estate. The most expensive was Turnberry in 2014, even though it was losing money then, too. He purchased a course in Doonbeg, Ireland, in the same year, also using cash.
Simpson told lawmakers that the firm's investigations had identified in the Trump Organization "patterns of buying and selling" real estate that "were suggestive of money laundering."
Later, he said that "because the Irish courses and the Scottish courses are under the UK," Fusion GPS was "able to get the financial statements."
"And they don't, on their face, show Russian involvement, but what they do show is enormous amounts of capital flowing into these projects from unknown sources and - or at least on paper it says it's from the Trump Organization, but it's hundreds of millions of dollars," Simpson said. "And these golf courses are just, you know, they're sinks. They don't actually make any money."
Trump's son Eric said last year that Harvie's claims had "no basis in fact" and called them "disgusting."
Scotland's government rejected the calls for an unexplained wealth order on the grounds that it was for the country's law officers, not politicians, to instigate such investigations. Nonetheless, these questions about how Trump paid for his golf resorts and why they keep losing so much money will only grow.
New York AG: "We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity"
Rebecca Falconer
·1 min read
The New York attorney general's office said Tuesday night it has informed the Trump Organization that its investigation into the company "is no longer purely civil in nature" and is now also a criminal one.
Why it matters: The attorney general's office is now working with the Manhattan district attorney's office, which has been investigating the Trump Organization for potential bank, tax and insurance fraud.
Driving the news: New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) announced in 2019 that her office was investigating Trump Organization finances.
Her office filed a lawsuit last August to compel the organization to comply with subpoenas for an investigation into whether former President Trump and his company improperly inflated the value of its assets on financial statements.
Fabien Levy, a spokesperson for James, said in an emailed statement Tuesday: "We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity, along with the Manhattan DA." Levy declined to comment further.
What they're saying: Representatives for the Trump Organization did not immediately respond to Axios' request for comment on the news, first reported by CNN.
But Trump has previously denied any wrongdoing and accused James of "politically motivated harassment" and called Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance's investigation a political "witch hunt."
President Joe Biden, while touting his $174 billion electric vehicle (EV) plan, ignored his record of allowing Chinese investors with ties to the Chinese Communist Party to buy up key parts of the American EV industry.
During a speech at the Ford Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Dearborn, Michigan, Biden touted his record as vice president to former President Barack Obama in relation to the nation’s battery-powered EVs.
“Our own Department of Energy pioneered and transformed the battery industry when Barack and I were in office. And through the Recovery Act’s grants and loans, battery prices dropped 80 percent because we were looking forward,” Biden said.
Biden also said he would not allow “a single contract go to a single company that does not hire Americans, have all American parts, and has an American supply chain that is an American product supply chain.”
Unmentioned in the speech, though, was Biden’s record of allowing Chinese investors with Chinese Communist Party ties to acquire American companies with EV technology capabilities.
Detailed analysis by Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Rebecca Mansour showed extensively how the Obama-Biden administration had let China buy up this critical industry in the United States market from 2009 to 2016:
The biggest winner in this push for an all-electric future is China, which is eager for the transition to EV because the communist regime does not have the same access to plentiful oil and gas as American consumers. In fact, the Chinese Communist Party has made dominance of the EV industry a key goal in its ambitious China 2025 initiative, hoping to overtake Detroit as the world’s automotive capital.
Indeed, China is positioning itself to do just that. Companies like Ford and General Motors have partnered with Chinese state-owned companies to develop and manufacture new electric vehicles in Asia. Ford has 16 new electric models coming out of China in the next few years, and GM intends to launch 20 electric models in China by 2023.
To be fair, the entire worldwide auto industry seems eager for an all-electric future. Nearly all of the world’s auto manufacturers are investing heavily in EV. There’s a reason for this, and it has less to do with the environment and more to do with the industry’s bottom line.
When you eliminate the internal combustion engine, you eliminate hundreds of components that comprise it. This will dramatically change the landscape of the automotive industry for millions of parts suppliers, engineers, mechanics, and countless blue-collar workers. That’s because the average electric vehicle deletes over 300 components. The fuel-powered vehicle’s engine, transmission, gas tank, radiator, hoses, pumps, starter motor, mounting brackets, etc. will all become obsolete.
This will dramatically reduce the amount of money it costs to produce a vehicle, but it will also reduce the number of blue-collar workers all along the supply chain needed to create those parts and assemble the finished product. However, the sticker price of the electric vehicle will not be reduced. These vehicles will be just as expensive for consumers as gas-powered vehicles even though they cost less to manufacture. In other words, EVs will be a cash cow for the big auto companies, but will not necessarily benefit American workers, American consumers (who are still skeptical of EVs), or even the American environment which relies on a fossil fuel-based power grid to charge EV batteries.
Most notably, the Obama-Biden administration approved the acquisition of the Michigan-based electric battery company A123 Systems in 2013 after previously being rewarded with American taxpayer dollars worth $12.5 million to develop lithium ion battery technology for plug-in hybrid EVs.
Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, had particular ties to such Chinese acquisitions of American EV companies, Mansour notes:
Consider, for example, China’s controversial acquisition of the Michigan-based electric battery company A123 Systems. In 2008, the company was awarded a $12.5 million grant sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy to develop lithium ion battery technology for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. But now this American taxpayer-funded research is owned by China, thanks to the Obama-Biden administration’s approval of the company’s sale in 2013.
In 2016, China purchased the electric vehicle company Fisker Automotive, after U.S. taxpayers had spent $193 million funding the company’s electric vehicle research. Fisker was based in Biden’s home state of Delaware, and it benefitted from a “fog of politically connected investors and lobbyists,” according to the Washington Post. The Obama-Biden administration approved China’s purchase of Fisker, again despite all the money American taxpayers spent funding the company’s research.
In 2015, the private equity firm of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, partnered with a Chinese military contractor to acquire Henniges Automotive, another Michigan-based company. Henniges created dual-use military technology that China’s communist regime wanted. Despite all the red-flags that this sensitive technology would end up in the hands of China’s military, the Obama-Biden administration approved the company’s sale.
Specifically, in 2008, Biden’s Department of Energy Secretary, Jennifer Granholm — then, the Governor of Michigan — approved a $10 million taxpayer-funded grant to A123 Systems and praised the move. In 2013, the Obama-Biden administration approved the Wanxiang Group’s acquisition of A123 Systems.
A database compiled by Public Citizen reveals hundreds of cases where the Obama-Biden administration approved Chinese acquisitions of American companies — many in the auto and batteries industry.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.