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US Professor Teases Story Linking Trumps And Russian Mafia To Caruana Galizia Assassination

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American communications professor Seth Abramson has become virally popular for his Twitter threads detailing Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with the Russian government, and an upcoming post of his could leave a significant ripple effect on Malta. 

This is because Abramson claims to have information linking the Trump-Russia collusion scandal with the Panama Papers and the assassination of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia. 

“I’m delaying a thread about Ivanka [Trump], the Russian mafia, Daphne Galizia, the Panama Papers, Alexandre Nogueira, and the ICIJ until I have more time,” he wrote in a cryptic tweet on Christmas Day. “Until then, a summary: Ivanka was working with Russian mafia; Galizia helped uncover it; Galizia was assassinated.” 

Caruana Galizia’s eldest son Matthew, an ICIJ journalist who won a Pulitzer for his work on the Panama Papers, responded that the only Russians his mother had investigated were the ones who had paid bribes to the Prime Minister’s chief of staff Keith Schembri to purchase Maltese citizenship. 

Lovin Malta has reached out to Abramson to ask exactly what he was referring to when he said that Caruana Galizia had helped uncover the Russian mafia. 

Abramson’s tweet came attached with a recent Reuters-NBC News report into how The Trump Ocean Club International Hotel in Panama City, Trump’s first international hotel venture, had links with international organised crime. Trump wanted to use the Panama project as a “baby” for his daughter Ivanka, according to Roger Khafif, a Panamian developer who pitched the deal to Trump in 2005. 

However, a report by NGO Global Witness states that the Trump Ocean Club was used to launder proceeds from Colombian cartels’ narcotics trafficking. Although there is no evidence that Trump had even been aware of the criminal backgrounds of some of the Ocean Club’s brokers, buyers and investors, he seemed to have done little to nothing to prevent this. 

At the heart of the report is a certain Alexandre Ventura Nogueira, a Brazilian former car salesman who Ivanka Trump had chosen as a lead broker to sell hotel units. Ventura’s firm, Homes Real Estate Investment & Services, delivered, selling 350 to 400 units, about $100m worth of property, he told Reuters and NBC.

Ventura seemed close to Ivanka Trump and even met her father once, at a reception in 2008 at the Trump family’s Mar-a-Lago estate. However, a year later he was arrested in Panama for real estate fraud unrelated to the Trump Ocean Club project, fled on bail and is currently living a fugitive in an undisclosed European city. 

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Alexandre Ventura Nogueira with Ivanka Trump (left) and with Donald Trump 

Ventura confirmed with Reuters that some of his brokers and clients who bought units at the Trump Ocean Club, were connected to the Russian mafia and other organised crime groups. These include convicted Colombian cocaine trafficker David Murcia Guzman and Russians such as Arkady Vodovozov, who was convicted of kidnapping in Israel, and Igor Anapolskiy, who was convicted of forging travel documents in Ukraine. Several buyers remained unidentified because they purchased and sold their hotel units through anonymous shell companies. Ventura said he set up hundreds of such corporations, charging roughly $1,000 each.

Mauricio Ceballos, a former financial crimes prosecutor in Panama who investigated Ventura, told NBC the skyscraper was a “vehicle for money laundering”.

The Trump Organisation has played down Ventura’s connections with the Trumps, telling Reuters they did not remember meeting him, and that such contacts would have been “meaningless” and just one of hundreds of public appearances they make each year.

READ NEXT: Malta Quick To React (Hilariously) To Claims Russians Planted Egrant Story

Tim is interested in the rapid evolution of human society and is passionate about justice, human rights and cutting-edge political debates. You can follow him on Instagram or Twitter/X at @timdiacono or reach out to him at [email protected]

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