Kushner Gets $200M Loan From Citigroup For Trump Bay Street In Jersey City
Kushner Cos. has landed another large loan from Citigroup mere weeks after a previous deal came under heavy scrutiny over a potential conflict of interest.
Citigroup has agreed to loan $200M to Kushner and partner KABR Group for the joint venture's Trump Bay Street multifamily tower in Jersey City, Bloomberg reports. The debt will go toward paying off a construction loan that came due in September, which included $50M from Chinese investors through the EB-5 visa program.
In March 2017, Jared Kushner met with Citigroup CEO Mike Corbat at the White House in his role as senior adviser to President Donald Trump. Later that month, Citigroup agreed to loan $325M to a project in the Dumbo Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn partially owned by Kushner Cos. Citigroup denied that the meeting had any connection with either the Dumbo Heights or Jersey City deals.
Kushner Cos. owns 12.5% of Trump Bay Street, 2% of which is owned by Jared Kushner himself through a trust, according to Bloomberg. The Trump Organization does not own a stake in the tower, which bears the company (and president's) name through a licensing deal. Though Kushner denies taking part in any business dealings for his family's company since he joined the White House, his refusal to divest from his personal holdings is one of a long list of potential conflicts of interest that have attracted criticism.
Among those conflicts was the mention of White House connections by Kushner's sister Nicole Meyer in a May meeting with potential EB-5 investors in China for Kushner Cos.' next Jersey City skyscraper, One Journal Square — a moment the company played off as a faux pas, but which soon was followed by a federal subpoena. The use of EB-5 investors at Trump Bay Street was one of the reasons that Kushner Cos. took so long to find a partner for this most recent loan, according to Bloomberg.
