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WASHINGTON (AP) – Donald Trump spent years cultivating business ventures in China, where he maintained a previously unknown bank account, The New York Times reported Tuesday, as the U.S. president tries to portray election rival Joe Biden as weaker in Beijing.
Trump has spent the past few days promoting a murky claim that Biden’s son Hunter sold access to his father in Ukraine and China when he was vice president of Barack Obama.
However, it is Trump who kept an office in China during his first run for president and partnered with a major government-controlled company, the Times reported.
Trump also maintains a previously unknown bank account in China, controlled by Trump International Hotels Management, according to an analysis of his tax records by the newspaper.
It is one of only three foreign nations, including Great Britain and Ireland, in which it does so.
Tax records show that the company “paid US $ 188,561 in taxes in China while pursuing license agreements there from 2013 to 2015,” the Times reported.
Trump Organization lawyer Alan Garten said the company had “opened an account with a Chinese bank that has offices in the United States to pay local taxes.”
“Agreements, transactions or other commercial activities never materialized and, since 2015, the office has been inactive,” he told The Times. “Although the bank account remains open, it has never been used for any other purpose.”
Under his slogan “America First,” Trump has presented China as the greatest threat to America and world democracy.
He launched a massive trade war that has cost China billions of dollars, harangued Chinese tech companies and blamed Beijing for the coronavirus pandemic.
Still, in 2008 Trump tried an office tower project that ultimately failed in Guangzhou, and in 2012 he opened an office in Shanghai, the Times said.
In addition, Trump Hotel Collection (THC) negotiated with State Grid Corporation of China, a power company and the country’s largest state-owned company, to mark and manage a major development in Beijing, the sources told AFP.
But the offer was later dropped.
Meanwhile, Biden’s income tax returns and financial transactions show no business connection to China.
