Mark Schiefelbein/AP
In the opening days of his war against Iran, Donald Trump had a message for members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps: Surrender and get “total immunity”—or face “absolutely guaranteed death.”
An elite armed force that exists outside Iran’s normal military structure, the IRGC began as the ayatollah’s personal strike force. But during the country’s reconstruction in the 1980s after the Iran-Iraq War, it also became a major economic force. The construction companies that the Guard organized became spectacularly lucrative, expanding their work abroad.
The Guard is now both the spine of Iran’s military and a driving force in its economy. And this isn’t the first time Trump has crossed paths with people with alleged IRGC connections.
Back in 2012, long before he ever was the GOP’s dark-horse presidential candidate, Donald Trump signed a deal to put his name on a sail-shaped tower in Baku, Azerbaijan—a notoriously corrupt, oil-rich city on the shores of the Caspian Sea. His partners in the deal were suspect: the family of then-transportation minister Ziya Mammadov, a man with a $12,000 annual salary but an estimated net worth in the billions.
Under the terms of the deal, Trump was set to make millions of dollars, renting his name to be used to market an already built building that had been constructed by the Mammadovs. Trump’s company would then continue to manage hotel operations at the newly christened Trump Tower Baku. The hotel never opened. (A fire later at least partially gutted the building, and it now operates as a Ritz-Carlton.) Nevertheless, according to financial disclosures, Trump earned at least $2.5 million from the deal.
As I wrote in 2015, the optics were very bad for anyone, but especially a leading presidential candidate. The Mammadovs were problematic:
In an article titled “The Corleones of the Caspian,” Foreign Policy reported that the “profit margins” of [Anar] Mammadov’s Garant [corporation] “appear inextricably linked to a number of sweetheart contracts signed with his father’s Transport Ministry.” One of Mammadov’s other companies has received over $1 billion in highway construction contracts, and the firm owns many of Baku’s buses and taxis. Until 2013, Mammadov owned a majority stake in the bank that processed all of the taxi cab fares and the company that provided insurance to all the cabs. According to Foreign Policy, the company that Trump is working with also secured the contract to construct the Baku bus station, which Mammadov’s uncle owns. A leaked diplomatic cable on Azerbaijan’s “most powerful families,” drafted in 2010 by the charge d’affairs at the US embassy in Baku, noted: “With so much of the nation’s oil wealth being poured into road construction, the Mammadovs also control a significant source of rent-seeking.”
But it wasn’t just the Mammadovs who were problematic—they themselves are alleged to have had ties to some particularly shady business partners at the same time Trump was working the Mammadovs: associates of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
According to reporting by the New Yorker in 2018, those ties included some unusually profitable highway construction deals in Azerbaijan, with the approval of Ziya Mammadov. Leaked US State Department cables detailed just how close Mammadov’s relationship to the Darvish family, prominent IRGC associates, was:
At least three Darvishis—the brothers Habil, Kamal, and Keyumars—appear to be associates of the Guard. In Farsi press accounts, Habil, who runs the Tehran Metro Company, is referred to as a sardar, a term for a senior officer in the Revolutionary Guard. A cable sent on March 6, 2009, from the U.S. Embassy in Baku described Kamal as having formerly run “an alleged Revolutionary Guard-controlled business in Iran.” The company, called Nasr, developed and acquired instruments, guidance systems, and specialty metals needed to build ballistic missiles. In 2007, Nasr was sanctioned by the U.S. for its role in Iran’s effort to develop nuclear missiles.
The cable said that Kamal and Keyumars were frequent visitors to Azerbaijan; Kamal had recently established “a close business relationship/friendship” with Ziya Mammadov, and, with Mammadov’s assistance, had been awarded “at least eight major road construction and rehabilitation contracts, including contracts for construction of the Baku-Iranian Astara highway.” (Keyumars also seems to have been involved in these deals.) The cable added, “We assume Mammedov [sic] is a silent partner in these contracts.”
The Trumps have always denied knowing anything about the IRGC’s relationship to the Mammadovs, and for that matter, they also denied knowing there was anything untoward about the Mammadovs themselves. The New Yorker noted that under a US law called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, US companies are required to do due diligence to ensure they are not getting involved with corruption when they invest in foreign countries. A lawyer for the Trump Organization told the New Yorker that the Trumps never had any in-depth dealings or substantial say in the tower project, that it was only a licensing deal, and that the Trumps never saw any warning signs about the Mammadovs. There’s no evidence that IRGC-related companies worked directly on the Trump project.
Jessica Tillipman, a law professor and associate dean at George Washington University, told the New Yorker that not knowing about a partner’s alleged corruption isn’t a good excuse:
“Nor can you escape liability by looking the other way. The entire Baku deal is a giant red flag—the direct involvement of foreign government officials and their relatives in Azerbaijan with ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Corruption warning signs are rarely more obvious.”
Shortly after taking office for his second term, Trump paused enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. When he brought it back last June, his administration announced it would enforce the law less vigorously.
Neither the Trump Organization nor the White House responded to requests for comment.
