A Scottish court on Wednesday gave activists the green light to continue their effort to use an anti–money laundering statute to investigate the financing of Donald Trump’s golf courses in the country.
While Trump built his reputation in New York City real estate, the gravitational center of his business empire has shifted toward Scotland in the last decade, with the two courses he operates there requiring huge amounts of cash to build and maintain. By some estimates, Trump would have had to spend half of his available cash to finance his 2014 purchase of the famed Turnberry golf course in southwest Scotland. According to Trump himself, he has spent more than $400 million on Turnberry and a second course in Aberdeenshire, along the windy North Sea coast, which he built from scratch. Neither course has ever turned a profit. In fact, both courses bleed money.
The amount of money Trump has dumped—and continues to dump—into the courses has raised suspicions about these ventures. The numbers simply don’t add up—it’s an extraordinary amount of cash that Trump would have had to struggle to scrape together, spent on a business that doesn’t seem to be paying off. Mysteriously, Trump has pumped money into these properties through ongoing loans—loans to himself, with no due date and no interest charged. Financial experts interviewed by Mother Jones say it’s hard to come up with a rationale, legal or not, for Trump’s Scottish dealings.
