What Donald Trump’s money trail says about tracking the ultra-rich

The sorry point is, we did choose. Trump was literally appointed a “Global Scot”, by Labour, then by SNP administrations. He was swished, indeed piped into the country, to seal the deal on his various golf courses.

Sure, a retrospective shoulder-shrug might be raised. Who would have thought this Studio-57-dwelling, cartoonish capitalist would be any more influential than any other Burt-Lancaster-like mogul, mistily invoking his Scaddish roots?

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But here he is now: the Emperor of the Caligularity, cavorting luridly in his mother’s homeland. He corruptly spends hundreds of thousands of Pentagon dollars housing officials at his own Trump Turnberry hotel. He rains contempt on Scottish villagers and politicians who stand in his expansion path.

And as the Misogynist-in-Chief, he induces visible shuddering and visceral recoil among SNP ministers.

What can we do to resist him, maybe even to atone for him (some lessons learned there about diaspora economics, at least)? We once raised the famous hair aloft with a static-covered balloon; those were happier, more civilian days.

But there must be something ineffably Scottish we can do, to distance, nay cleanse ourselves from one of Scotland’s worst descendants.

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You’re right: it has to be a massive, involved and thunderous legal investigation. And courtesy of Patrick Harvie MSP, the petition campaigners Avaaz and the continuing deliberations of Scottish legal and criminal offices, it looks like one is sitting right in our lap.

The Green member rose to his heights on Thursday, to ask what the Scottish Government (and its legal advice) was doing about a potential investigation into Trump Turnberry.

In their systems – that is, stranded somewhere between the Lord Advocate, the Criminal Recovery Unit, the Crown Office and the Scottish Cabinet since April last year – sits Avaaz’s meticulous claim.

Trump’s Scottish hotels should be subject to a 2017 piece of all-island legislation called an “unexplained wealth order”. This gives the state powers to investigate someone’s property and other assets, if it suspects that the money paying for them is way beyond the visible means of the owner.

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UWOs were originally brought in to challenge the charge that the UK (and particularly the London property market) was an off-shore money-launderers paradise for Russian gangsters.

Indeed, the pop-culture UWO case in recent memory was triggered by the wife of an Azerbaijan diplomat, who managed to spend £15m in Harrods during their stay. What’s core to a UWO is that there is a “politically exposed person” (PEP) involved. Some state official, diplomat or politician, open and susceptible to bribery, corruption and fraud.

This is where the ruffling of hair turns into a body blow to the current US administration. Various journalists have gone onto the record – indeed, the congressional record – wondering how Trump actually had the money to purchase the Turnberry properties in April 2014 (£35.7m).

In 2018, the New Yorker concluded that “there simply isn’t enough money coming into Trump’s known business to cover the massive outlay he spent on Turnberry”.

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In sworn testimony to Congress on November 14, 2018, Glenn Simpson of research company Fusion GPS told of studying Trump’s financial declarations to UK authorities. He saw “enormous amounts of capital flowing into these projects from unknown sources”.

“On paper it says it’s from The Trump Organization, but it’s hundreds of millions of dollars. And these golf courses are just, you know, they’re sinks. They don’t actually make any money”, continued Simpson.

“If you’re familiar with Donald Trump’s finances and the litigation over whether he’s really a billionaire, there’s good reason to believe he doesn’t have enough money to do this and that he had to have outside financial support for these things”.

“We mostly are working off public records”, concludes Simpson. “A lot of what I do is analyse whether things make sense and whether they can be explained. And that didn’t make sense to me, doesn’t make sense to me to this day.”

For context, Avaaz report lays out the range of Trump advisors and lackeys that have been convicted for fraudulent dealing and associations with Russian influences. They also itemise the amounts of loans and transactions that Trump concluded with Russian figures, all happening around the Turnberry purchase.

Avaaz’s challenge to the Scottish Government is clear. If there is reasonable suspicion that Trump’s dealings in Scotland are involved in money-laundering, shouldn’t the Government investigate, not least to maintain Scotland’s own financial reputation?

It’s not exactly clear who should finally trigger an Unexplained Wealth Order. The Criminal Recovery Unit “neither confirms nor denies the existence of an ongoing investigation”, as they wrote back to Avaaz in July 2019.

But three Scottie-dug cheers to representative Harvie – for kicking it back out of the long grass, moving it closer to the hole.

One might imagine at this point something sotto-voce, stage right: should we be riling up the leader of the world’s biggest (and increasingly rogue) state? Let’s talk about this. If Scotland is to be independent in the world, what do we want that status to communicate?

I happen to think that Ireland’s various and consciously designed fiscal loopholes, allowing major tech corps to dodge the vast majority of their taxes, has not been a good look for the country.

The “creative accounting” Scotland should proclaim is around sustainability, patient capital, the investments required for a zero-carbon society. Not hot money filling up the elevator shoes of orange-tinted gangsters.

In his new book Capital and Ideology, the superstar French economist Thomas Piketty raises the standard for a new era of financial transparency. We live in an era of “big data” and machine intelligence, a world engirded and penetrated by powerful networks.

So why, asks Piketty, is our capacity to track the distribution of wealth – and particularly the wealth of the 1%, the 0.1%, the 0.001% – worse than it ever was?

In December, Piketty and scores of other eminent economists alerted us to an opportunity to put accurate inequality stats in the picture, when the UN revises its System of National Accounts (a globally-agreed method of measuring economies) in the next three years. Here’s something – when we get our feet under the big table in New York, that is – we could support.

As Piketty says in his new book, “each state can make progress toward the final goal without waiting for others to act”. For example, if we digitally reported to the state not just information about the income of assets, but information about those assets themselves, could we increase “the quality of public data and democratic transparency”? And thus make better collective decisions about tax and spend?

Reinforcing all the cliches, the French academic has a glittery new abstraction to spin before our eyes: proprietarian. Meaning, “a social order based on a quasi-religious defense of property rites, as the sine qua non of social and political stability”.

Such proprietarianism would explain the total pelters that Patrick Harvie got from Trump Junior yesterday: “disgusting”, “reckless”, “irresponsible”, “irrelevant” and “spineless”. I’m hearing echoes here of Ned Beatty’s speech in Paddy Chayefsky’s Network: “YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!”

No he won’t. See you at the last Turnberry hole, Mr President. Praying for the ultimate lucky gust of wind, upside your fluffy heid.