REVEALED: Trump Says Kuwait Sovereign Fund Not Keen on U.S. Deals After War
Posted on 08/16/2015
Photo Credit: NBC News – Meet the Press, Interview between Chuck Todd and Donald Trump
U.S. Republican Primary Presidential Candidate Donald Trump was interviewed by NBC News Host Chuck Todd on August 16th on the show, Meet the Press. Trump is leading the Republican U.S. Presidential Primary in a number of polls in the early primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire. Among a myriad of topics and issues, Trump discussed his interactions with Gulf countries, notably Kuwait. These statements were echoed earlier on a Fox News show where Trump was interviewed by Sean Hannity.
NBC News Interview: Here
Trump: Shortly after the war [in reference to the first Gulf war], the Kuwaiti fund came to see me, and they wanted to do a deal.
We have a great deal in the United States.
They go no, no, no, not, not, United States, not United States.
We don’t want to invest in the United States.
We gave them back their country.
In the early 1990s, many of the Gulf sovereign funds had a strong preference of direct investments in Europe, particularly the U.K. and France.
The KIA does have a scattered history of investing in U.S. real estate, especially hotels and property. In fact, SWFI is hosting their next America summit at The Phoenician, in Scottsdale Arizona in February 2016. The resort hotel, at one point in the early 1990s, was owned by the Kuwait Investment Office (KIO), a sovereign wealth enterprise of the Kuwait Investment Authority. For a long time, the KIO had a 45% stake in The Phoenician and Crescent Hotel in Arizona, buying the rest from the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) in 1991.