What happened
Jared Kushner’s private equity firm Affinity Partners Monday pulled out of a deal to finance a Trump-branded development in Serbia’s capital, Belgrade. Affinity’s withdrawal came hours after a member of President Aleksandar Vucic’s Cabinet and three other officials were indicted for allegedly abusing their positions and falsifying documents as the government worked to strip the bombed-out former military site of its cultural-heritage protections.
Who said what
Affinity said it was withdrawing from the half-billion-dollar deal “because meaningful projects should unite rather than divide, and out of respect for the people of Serbia and the City of Belgrade.” It was an “abrupt end to an increasingly controversial project that Kushner,” President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, “has worked on for more than two years,” The Wall Street Journal said.
The project to build apartments and a Trump-branded luxury hotel on a central Belgrade site bombed by NATO in 1999 involved Kushner and the Trump Organization, “run by the president’s sons Eric and Donald Trump Jr.,” The New York Times said. The project, “fiercely championed” by Vucic, “exemplified the willingness of foreign governments to bend over backward to further the financial interests” of Trump and his family. Serbia “has plenty of things it wants from the Trump administration, such as lifting sanctions on its sole oil refinery,” the Journal said.
What next?
The Serbian prosecutor’s office said its corruption investigation was ongoing and could lead to further indictments. Vucic in recent days has “vowed to pardon any officials caught up in the case,” the Journal said, and “stepped up his rhetoric” against the “semi-independent” prosecutor’s office.
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