Jared Kushner facing accusations of profiteering from Middle East peace role as business ties to Israel deepen

President Donald Trump's son-in-law's real estate company reportedly received $30m investment for Maryland apartment complex development from Israeli corporation Menora Mivtachim

Jared Kushner (Getty)

Last May, Jared Kushner accompanied President Donald Trump, his father-in-law, on the pair’s first diplomatic trip to Israel, part of Kushner’s White House assignment to achieve peace in the Middle East.

Shortly before, his family real estate company received a roughly $30 million investment from Menora Mivtachim, an insurer that is one of Israel’s largest financial institutions, according to a Menora executive.

The deal, which was not made public, pumped significant new equity into 10 Maryland apartment complexes controlled by Kushner’s firm. While Kushner has sold parts of his business since taking a White House job last year, he still has stakes in most of the family empire - including the apartment buildings in and around Baltimore.

The Menora transaction is the latest financial arrangement that has surfaced between Kushner’s family business and Israeli partners, including one of the country’s wealthiest families and a large Israeli bank that is the subject of a US criminal investigation.

The business dealings don’t appear to violate federal ethics laws, which require Kushner to recuse himself only from narrow government decisions that would have a “direct and predictable effect” on his financial interests. And no evidence has emerged that Kushner was personally involved in brokering the deal.

But the deal last spring illustrates how the Kushner Cos' extensive financial ties to Israel continue to deepen, even with his prominent diplomatic role in the Middle East. The arrangement could undermine the ability of the United States to be seen as an independent broker in the region. The Trump administration already inflamed tensions there when it said last month that it recognised Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and would move the US Embassy there from Tel Aviv.

“I think it’s reasonable for people to ask whether his business interests are somehow affecting his judgment,” said Matthew T. Sanderson, a lawyer at Caplin & Drysdale in Washington who specialises in government ethics and was general counsel to Senator Rand Paul’s presidential campaign.

Raj Shah, a deputy White House Press Secretary, said the Trump administration has “tremendous confidence in the job Jared is doing leading our peace efforts, and he takes the ethics rules very seriously and would never compromise himself or the administration.”

Christine Taylor, a spokeswoman for Kushner Cos, said the company has partners around the world. It “does no business,” she said, “with foreign sovereigns or governments, and is not precluded from doing business with any foreign company simply because Jared is working in the government.”

Menora, which is also Israel’s largest manager of pension funds, has done numerous other real estate deals, including several in the United States, said the Menora executive, Ran Markman, who is the company’s head of real estate. He said he had never met Kushner. In negotiating the deal with Kushner Cos, Markman said, he worked with Laurent Morali, the firm’s president.

The deal was “not done because of the so-called connections of Jared Kushner or Donald Trump,” Markman said. “The connection to the president was not an issue. It didn’t make us do the deal, it didn’t make us not do the deal.”

Kushner resigned as chief executive of Kushner Cos when he joined the White House last January. But he remains the beneficiary of a series of trusts that own stakes in Kushner properties and other investments. Those are worth as much as $761 million, according to government ethics filings, and most likely much more: The estimate nets out the significant debt accumulated by the firm, which has done about $7 billion of deals in the past decade.

Abbe D. Lowell, a lawyer for Kushner, said in a statement: “Jared Kushner has not been involved in, nor spoken about any Kushner Companies’ activities or project, since shortly before the Inauguration. He has an ethics agreement, reviewed by lawyers, with which he is in full compliance. Connecting any of his well-publicised trips to the Middle East to anything to do with Kushner Companies or its businesses is nonsensical and is a stretch to write a story where none actually exists.”

But Sanderson, the lawyer who specialises in government ethics, said, “Their standard seems like some version of ‘It’s a conflict when I think it’s a conflict, and I’ll make that judgment myself.'”

One issue, said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, a nonprofit government ethics group, is that “the ethics laws were not crafted by people who had the foresight to imagine a Donald Trump or a Jared Kushner.”

“No one could ever imagine this scale of ongoing business interests, not in a local peanut farm or a hardware store but sprawling global businesses that give the president and his top adviser personal economic stakes in an astounding number of policy interests,” Weissman added.

The New York Times