Don't read as it's my notebook - time to digest later. Notetaking: Facts could be cold, but never lie, of couse, up to your interpretation.
特朗普与郑家纯交锋 官司败诉旧事细节曝光(组图)
美国共和党总统参选人特朗普经常强调自己有办法对付中国，不过《纽约时报》指出，九十年代特朗普濒临破产，香港地产商郑家纯和罗康瑞向他出手襄助，合作发展纽约一幅地皮。其后地产价格上升，物业出售时，特朗普获利数亿美元，但他认为对方贱卖资产，入禀索偿10亿美元，最终败诉。
特朗普在宣布参选当天演辞中说：“中国一直都是我的手下败将。”他并称，他拥有纽约曼哈顿美洲大道1290号美国银行大楼的很大一部分股份，“那就是我在一场大战中从中国手里夺过来的，非常值钱。”
但据《纽约时报》报导，这幢美国银行大厦不仅不是他由中国赢回来的战利品，反而是他输掉与香港商人打官司的不快经历。
特朗普九十年代在香港接受访问。图片：南华早报
《纽约时报》报导，特朗普在九十年代持有该幢大厦所在的地皮，但由于当时地产市道不景，特朗普债台高筑，无力向银行支付与这块地皮相关的款项，更不要说发展地皮。
1994年，特朗普获现为新世界发??展主席的郑家纯和瑞安房地产主席的罗康瑞组成的财团出手襄助，同意购入该发展项目。合作条件包括，大厦落成出售后，特朗普将获其中三成利润作为回报。
《纽约时报》指，特朗普向来不爱出门，但为了达成协议，不得不要到香港，与郑家纯及罗康瑞面谈，又一起打高尔夫球，最后达成协议。
2005年，纽约地产市道复苏，郑家纯、罗康瑞的财团以17亿6000万美元高价将落成的大厦出售。但特朗普很愤怒，指两人事前没有咨询他，认为他们是贱卖资产。
他之后入禀纽约联邦法院，控告两人“严重违反受信义务”,向财团索取10亿美元惩罚性赔偿。官司打了四年，特朗普败诉。法庭更裁定特朗普要到2044年才可出售大厦利润的三成权益套现。
特朗普和当时的女朋友Marla Maples来港时顺道前往澳门。图片：南华早报
《纽约时报》近日再就事件访问特朗普。不过特朗普称那次败诉是一场胜利。他说:“更多的是凭借运气而非天赋，我到最后的结果好多了，因为两栋楼升值了。＂
他在访问时也承认，该大厦是以最好的价钱出售，并说：“如果遇到罗先生和郑先生，请告诉他们我认为他们都是很好的人。请让他们知道，唐纳德·特朗普非常尊敬他们。”
~~~ 1.
Scott Cole
Ashland, OR 4 hours ago
Trump has no record of public service or self-sacrifice. People can criticize Hillary, but I doubt being Secretary of State was a picnic. It's a job that can illicit nothing but criticism. Some elites in the country have actually tried to improve the country or the world. The Clintons have their foundation, there is Bill Gates, Jimmy Carter, Mark Zuckerberg, etc.
This should be a central question of the campaign: what have you done for the country? Now Trump is rushing to get some meager donations to veterans.
I would have slightly more respect for Trump and his supposed billions if he showed some measure of self-sacrifice: that he refused to accept ANY campaign donations (as he originally promised) and that he accept no salary if elected president.
He'd probably demand a raise.
~~ ~ 2.
"All the comments about how this is a "hit piece" and an ineffective one at that are just delightful. Trump is running for President on the suspect premises that he is 1) a successful businessman with talent that would translate to being president, and 2) possessed of special powers that would make him uniquely suited to negotiating with the Chinese.
Evidence that he is neither of those is relevant information that voters can use to make their own decisions. It isn't about whether this is effective, persuades his supporters, is a cheap shot, etc. Donald Trump makes certain claims. This article contains information about those claims and allows you to go from being a low information voter to a slightly less low information voter."
~~~~~ #3 --
Rita
is a trusted commenter California 7 hours ago
Credit where credit is due.
Trump has managed to convince his fans that he is an astute businessman, when he is little more than a high stakes gambler with an army of lawyers.
Credit where credit is due.
The world of high end real estate developers is entwined with the mega banks. Yet Trump has managed to convince his supporters that he is not part of that privileged world.
Credit where credit is due.
Trump lives in a world where his vast wealth shields him from his mistakes. So he thinks he is a great Dealmaker. And he has convinced his supporters of his magnificence.
Give him credit for being a great salesman, making the biggest sale to a huge crowd of Americans, including you?
~~~
Donald Trump Soured on a Deal, and Hong Kong Partners Became Litigants
Donald J. Trump, who has made reversing America’s trade imbalance a pillar of his campaign, often portrays himself as uniquely capable of wringing concessions out of China through hard-nosed business tactics he has honed over the years.
In fact, he says, he has a personal track record to back up his boasts.
“I beat China all the time,” Mr. Trump declared in a speech the day he announced his candidacy. “I own a big chunk of the Bank of America building at 1290 Avenue of the Americas that I got from China in a war. Very valuable.”
Mr. Trump does have an investment in the building, an office tower near Rockefeller Center. But court documents and interviews with people involved in the deal tell a very different story of how he ended up with it.
It began when a group of Hong Kong billionaires, including one who has been called the Donald Trump of China, helped rescue Mr. Trump from the verge of bankruptcy by investing in one of his properties in Manhattan.
For years, the carefully cultivated relationship between Mr. Trump and his Hong Kong partners proved lucrative for both sides, and stands out as perhaps the closest that Mr. Trump has come to international diplomacy.
To strike the deal, Mr. Trump had to attend elaborate dinner parties featuring foreign foods he did not want to eat. He delayed the closing because of Chinese spiritual beliefs and hunted around New York for a “feng shui” master to help with the building décor, instead of indulging his tastes for marble and gold, according to former associates of Mr. Trump who were involved in the deal.
But when his Hong Kong partners sold the property without his support, Mr. Trump waged a bitter, long-shot legal battle against them. And far from winning his share of the Bank of America building, according to court documents, he had to settle for it after losing in court. In the end, Mr. Trump’s alliance and eventual rivalry with some of Hong Kong’s richest men proved to be a tale of Mr. Trump at the extremes. It showcased his unflagging confidence in his ability to turn a bad financial situation around. But it also underscored his willingness to destroy a fruitful relationship with aggressive litigation.
Their partnership began in 1994, after the collapse of the real estate market left Mr. Trump deeply in debt. He could not afford to make the bank payments on a 77-acre swath of land near Lincoln Center known as Riverside South, let alone to develop the property.
In need of cash, he agreed to meet with intermediaries from a consortium of Hong Kong billionaires who were willing to buy the land, assume Mr. Trump’s debts and pay him 30 percent of the profits, as well as fees for helping to manage the development of the site, which they agreed to finance. It was by far the best offer he received. The group included Henry Cheng Kar-shun, one of the world’s richest developers, and Vincent Lo, who is Mr. Trump’s Chinese counterpart in more ways than one.
Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Lo comes from a wealthy family. He is well known for creating a hip restaurant area in Shanghai called Xintiandi, or “new heaven on earth,” an upscale brand he has replicated across China. His life has been chronicled by tabloids and society pages, especially his divorce from his first wife and his marriage to a beauty pageant winner, Miss Hong Kong of 1977.
Despite their similarities, Mr. Trump hesitated when he received an invitation to travel to Hong Kong to negotiate the deal. He does not like to travel, and he feared that negotiating on the Hong Kong developers’ turf would put him at a disadvantage and make him appear weak, said Abe Wallach, Mr. Trump’s executive vice president of acquisitions and finance at the time.
But face-to-face meetings are crucial in Chinese business culture, where personal bonds and political connections, collectively known as guanxi, are relied upon to avoid and resolve business disputes, sometimes more than the legal system. Eventually, Mr. Trump’s aides convinced him that he had to make the trip.
In Hong Kong, the golf games, dinner parties and intensive talks featured the awkwardness and cultural miscues that can crop up in any high-stakes international negotiation. Mr. Lo and Mr. Cheng invited Mr. Trump to play golf, but Mr. Trump was appalled when they told him they usually bet more than $1,000 on each hole. They ended up betting $100 per hole, and Mr. Trump wound up losing more than he won, Mr. Lo recalled in an interview this month.
“He’s a good golfer, but we had the local knowledge — he probably was jet-lagged,” Mr. Lo said.
Mr. Lo and Mr. Cheng invited Mr. Trump to dinner at the home of Mr. Cheng’s father, an uncommon honor in Chinese culture. But the evening was a trying experience for Mr. Trump.
“He didn’t like the food, and couldn’t use chopsticks,” recalled Mr. Wallach, who was there. “The first course was a whole fish, with the head still on. You could see the face of the fish and the teeth, which really looked grotesque. The servant put the fish in front of Donald. Donald said, ‘The honor belongs to Abe.’ I took my chopsticks and began to pick at it.”
Mr. Cheng and Mr. Lo also half-jokingly proposed an informal drinking contest, which Mr. Trump, a teetotaler, declined.
The Hong Kong partners were wary of Mr. Trump’s well-earned reputation for litigiousness. But for more than a decade, Mr. Trump avoided conflict with them. Indeed, he often deferred to them. Chase Manhattan Bank, which held Mr. Trump’s mortgage, initially scheduled the closing of the deal during China’s Ghost Month, during which some believe the spirits of the dead roam the earth.
Continue reading the main story“The Chinese told me that we would have to wait until after the fifteenth of September to close the deal,” Mr. Wallach wrote in a chapter of an unpublished book he is writing about his years with Mr. Trump. “Trump went apoplectic.” But he said that Mr. Trump went along.
(Mr. Lo said that any delay had been caused by a need to complete paperwork, and that he and his business partners were not superstitious.)
The project proved extremely profitable, as the New York real estate market rebounded. In 2005, the Hong Kong partners sold the development for $1.76 billion. Although it was believed to be the largest residential real estate transaction in the city’s history, Mr. Trump was furious, and contends to this day that his partners did not consult him first.
“I said: ‘Why didn’t you come talk to me? Whatever price you got, I could have gotten more money,’” Mr. Trump recalled in an interview this month.
Mr. Lo said that Mr. Trump had been informed of the decision, and that in any case it would have been very hard to shop such a large property around without Mr. Trump’s becoming aware of it.
Instead of accepting his share of the proceeds, Mr. Trump sued his partners for “staggering breach” of fiduciary duty in a lawsuit that demanded $1 billion in damages. Mr. Lo, who felt that Mr. Trump should have been appreciative of the deal he had received, called the lawsuit “a shock.”
And when the Hong Kong partners sought to invest the proceeds from the sale in Bank of America buildings in San Francisco and New York, Mr. Trump sought an injunction to scuttle the deal.
The judge ruled against him. Instead of receiving the cash he wanted, Mr. Trump had to accept a 30 percent share in the profits from the two Bank of America buildings, tied up in a partnership that is slated to last until 2044. But today, Mr. Trump counts that legal defeat as a victory.
“Through more luck than talent, I ended up much better because the buildings have increased in value,” he said. “In the end, it was fine.”
Nonetheless, Mr. Trump’s litigation over Riverside South dragged on for at least four years. He forced his partners to produce more than 166,000 pages of documents in court and accused them of various transgressions, including fraud and tax evasion.
During the litigation, Mr. Lo was forced to keep his trips to the United States secret, out of concern that Mr. Trump’s lawyers would serve him with court papers that would force him to remain in the United States.
Outside court, Mr. Trump’s battle seemed to take the shape of a personal rivalry with Mr. Lo, who had just bankrolled a Chinese reality television show called “Wise Man Takes All.” It loosely resembled Mr. Trump’s show “The Apprentice,” although Mr. Lo appeared just once on the show and handed out start-up capital to the winners instead of jobs.
Mr. Trump announced that he was going to take a version of “The Apprentice” to China to compete with Mr. Lo’s show, although Mr. Trump’s show there does not appear to have gotten off the ground. In an interview, Mr. Trump asked a reporter how Mr. Lo’s show had turned out, then answered his question: “Let’s put it this way. It wasn’t ‘The Apprentice,’ which was a big success.”
Mr. Lo said his show had met his real goal of promoting entrepreneurship in China.
After the lawsuit, the Hong Kong partners moved swiftly to cut all ties to Mr. Trump. Mr. Lo sold his shares in the partnership to the Cheng family, which sold to Vornado Realty Trust, now the owner of a 70 percent interest in the Bank of America buildings.
But in the interview, Mr. Trump sounded almost wistful about his former partners, marveling at the money they had made together and at the fact that they no longer spoke. He acknowledged that his former partners might have gotten the best deal possible on Riverside South, after all.
“It’s too bad that this happened,” Mr. Trump told a reporter.
“If you speak to Vincent and Henry, tell them I think they are fantastic people,” he said. “You let them know that Donald Trump has great respect for them, O.K.?”
Eight thousand miles away, in his penthouse office in Hong Kong, Mr. Lo laughed when told of Mr. Trump’s comment. He made clear that he had not forgotten being sued for $1 billion.
“Well, that’s him,” Mr. Lo said. “To file a lawsuit is nothing. It’s just like having lunch.”
