Michael Safi
Prospective investors in a Trump Tower project near Delhi are being offered a conversation and dinner with Donald Trump Jras part of a marketing campaign that has drawn criticism from corruption watchdogs.
Full-page advertisements reading “Trump is here. Are you invited?”featured on the front page of three Indian national newspapers at the weekend ahead of a visit by the US president’s son to India this week.
Trump Jr, the executive director of the Trump Organization, is expected to arrive in Delhi on Monday, where he will be shown around one of the four construction projects in the country licensed by the family company.
Those who purchase an apartment before Tuesday in the towers in Gurgaon, a satellite site about an hour south of Delhi, will be invited to dine with Trump Jr on Thursday.
A similar arrangement promoted by the developers, Tribeca and M3M, to fly buyers to New York to meet Trump Jr was described by the former Obama corruption watchdog, Norman L Eisen, as an “ethics atrocity”.
“Access to the first family should not be for sale,” Eisen said last month. “It’s particularly inappropriate because we know he is in constant communication with his father, so it does create a conduit to attempt to influence the president and one of his closest confidants and family members.”
Donald Trump ceded control of the organisation to his sons before his inauguration in January 2017, an arrangement ethics lawyers said would not eliminate conflicts of interest between policy decisions and his family’s finances.
Those concerns are likely to be fuelled by Trump Jr’s visit, and particularly a scheduled address at the Global Business Summit in Delhi later this week along with the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, and several Indian cabinet ministers.
Trump Jr will also visit projects in Kolkata, Mumbai and Pune. India is the company’s largest market outside the US, earning the family up to $3m in royalties in 2016.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), a watchdog group chaired by Eisen, said in a report released last month that Trump was continuing to profit from his businesses while in office and “in many cases he is profiting as a result of his presidency”.
It pointed to reports in the Indian media of developers claiming prices in Trump-branded buildings had risen by up to 18% as a result of his presidency, with others claiming sales at up to 30% above market rates.
In an interview with the New York Times last week, Trump Jr said he had spent nearly a decade “cultivating relationships in India” and his company was “now seeing the response of that effort”.
He denied he would use any meetings with government ministers or officials to push for concessions for Trump-branded projects in India. “We certainly won’t get involved in that,” he said.
He is the second of the US president’s children to visit the country since his inauguration. Ivanka, Trump’s eldest daughter, visited Hyderabad in November to speak at an entrepreneurship summit in her capacity as a presidential adviser.
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