In the early 2000s, Donald Trump and the South Korean Daewoo Group built the Trump World Tower in New York. According to a media report, the business relationship continued after that. The future US President even received a loan from the company, which he quickly repaid after his election.
Former US President Donald Trump entered the US presidential election campaign in 2016 with a multi-million dollar loan from South Korea, which he probably should have disclosed as a candidate for public office. The US magazine "Forbes" reports that the loan of at least $19.8 million was provided by the South Korean Daewoo concern. In the mid-1990s, Daewoo was the only South Korean company allowed to do business in the communist north.
According to the report, the loan had existed since at least 2011. The background was therefore unspecified license fees. By 2016, the year of the election campaign, Trump is said not to have repaid any installment of the loan. In June 2017, five months after his inauguration, suddenly only a balance of $ 4.3 million was open. On July 5, 2017, the loan from Daewoo was paid in full, as "Forbes" writes, citing the available documents. It does not show who transferred the sum.
It goes on to say that the business relationships between Trump and Daewoo should go back much further. They are said to have teamed up for the first time in 1997 and in the years that followed successfully built the Trump World Tower in New York near the United Nations. Daewoo is said to have used Trump's name on at least six buildings in South Korea that were developed between 1999 and 2007.
When and why Trump later took out a loan from Daewoo is not clear from the documents. As "Forbes" reports, the South Korean company originally loaned the future US President apparently $ 25 million. It follows that by 2011, Trump had already paid $5 million of his debt.
The loan is said to have been listed in the books of the Trump Organization. In contrast, it does not appear in the financial documents that Trump had to publish during the election campaign, although the former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, stated in an interview with the "New York Times" in 2016 that Trump had all the financial obligations that he had to owns other companies, have made public. According to Forbes, however, it is unclear whether Trump violated applicable US election campaign laws by concealing the loan.
Daewoo was founded in 1967 and for decades was the second largest South Korean conglomerate after the Hyundai Group with more than 20 divisions. After bankruptcy in 1999, Daewoo was broken up into three similarly sized parts, mainly involved in steel processing, shipbuilding and the financial industry. In Germany, the automotive division of Daewoo was well known, which was also dismantled into its individual parts and sold after the Asian crisis in 2002. In 2007, the former CEO of Daewoo International, one of the three divisions, was convicted of illegal arms exports to Myanmar. The Forbes report does not reveal which division Trump received the loan from.
