People who are familiar with the transactions say that Qatari wealth funds have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Jared Kushner’s private equity firm. Qatar joins Saudi Arabia in supporting the venture that the son-in-law of former President Donald J. Trump started when he left the White House.
The continued efforts of Mr. Trump and his aides and allies to profit from the close ties they built with the Arab world during his presidency and the desire of leaders in the region to maintain good relations with Mr. Kushner as his father-in-law seeks the presidency again are reflected in the infusion of money from interests in the two rival Persian Gulf monarchies.
Two people with knowledge of that deal say that a Qatari company made an investment of the same size. The Qatari embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.
Qatari funds have previously helped the Kushner family. During the time that Trump was in office, a company with ties to Qatar helped to save the Kushners’ debt-laden midtown Manhattan tower, 666 Fifth Avenue.
According to people familiar with the internal deliberations of both governments, Qatari officials were initially reluctant to invest in Mr. Kushner’s private equity fund, at least in part due to the political risks involved.
After leaving government service, it is not uncommon for insiders from both parties to receive financial benefits from deals abroad, particularly in the Middle East. There are few laws or ethical guidelines that prohibit businesses run by former Democratic administration officials from signing lucrative contracts with Gulf states.
However, the size of the speculations Mr. Kushner’s endeavor has gotten from the Bay nations — in the scope of $2.5 billion — and the timing, coming somewhat not long after his going out, are striking and have drawn analysis from leftists and morals specialists.
The newly disclosed investments come from energy-rich nations whose sovereign wealth funds manage hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of assets. They are not particularly significant. Furthermore, they are far more modest than the responsibility made before by the really Saudi sovereign abundance store, a $650 billion substance known as the Public Speculation Asset, which, as The New York Times has revealed, contributed $2 billion with Mr. Kushner in 2021. Without specifying the amount, Affinity Partners has confirmed that the Public Investment Fund was supporting it.
Historically, Qatar has hedged its bets on American politics. The investments appear to be the most recent indication that, despite working with the Biden administration, they want to maintain cordial relationships with prominent officials from the Trump administration, particularly in the event that Mr. Trump were to become president once more.
However, the investments are a reflection of their relationship with Mr. Kushner, with whom they worked closely and who left the White House with a vast network of contacts, as well as an eye toward the future in the United States.
Affinity Partners only makes a few public disclosures, but a financial filing from March of last year shows that the branch of the company that handles money from Mr. Kushner’s overseas backers held $2.5 billion in capital on behalf of three different foreign investors. According to a person familiar with the situation, updated disclosures, which are anticipated to be filed by Friday, are likely to reveal that Affinity Partners now manages approximately $3 billion.
Mr. Kushner was a top White House adviser to Mr. Trump while he was in office. He was involved in American diplomacy in the Middle East and helped set up the Abraham Accords, a regional agreement that normalized relations between Israel and several Arab nations in 2020.
He was involved in discussions that helped lift a diplomatic and economic blockade of Qatar by its neighbors in the final days of Trump’s presidency. Mr. Kushner was developing a relationship with Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who was about to become the kingdom’s next king, at the time that the blockade, which was led by Saudi Arabia, was imposed in 2017.
John R. Bolton, who was Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, said that he never heard Mr. Kushner talk about the opportunities that he could get from his contacts in the Middle East when he left the government.
Mr. Bolton stated, “But certainly the way he’s approached it after leaving the White House has been very systematic and very effective.”
Since Mr. Trump’s term ended, Mr. Kushner is not the only official from the Trump administration who has benefited from connections in the Middle East. The former Treasury secretary Steven T. Mnuchin also runs a Gulf-based investment firm with support from sovereign wealth funds. He and Mr. Kushner attended an investment conference in Miami Beach on Thursday, which was hosted by a non-profit led by Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.Since leaving office, Mr. Trump, similar to his child in-regulation, has pursued Center East arrangements. He announced one with a Saudi real estate company, which plans to build a golf course, villas, and a Trump-branded hotel in Oman as part of a $4 billion project supported by the Omani government. Additionally, he is promoting the LIV Golf tour, which is sponsored by Saudi Arabia.
However, in the case of Mr. Kushner, investors in the region had questioned his lack of experience in the investment industry, and Democrats have criticized the speed with which he obtained financial commitments from nations with whom he had only recently been in official contact. Within a few short months of his departure from the White House, Mr. Kushner secured the Saudis’ $2 billion investment.
Ms. Maloney wrote in a letter to Mr. Kushner that “the appearance of a quid pro quo for your foreign policy work” was created by your close relationship with Crown Prince bin Salman, your pro-Saudi positions during the Trump administration, and PIF’s decision to fund the majority of your new business venture “only six months after the end of your White House tenure.”
“Mr. Kushner fully abided by all legal and ethical guidelines both during and after his government service,” was the response provided at the time by a spokesperson for Mr. Kushner. When Republicans took control of the House this year, they ended the Kushner investigation.
Kushner and Mnuchin spent time in the Middle East during the final days of Trump’s presidency. Both Mr. Kushner and Mr. Trump were pushing a new initiative known as the “Abraham Fund,” which they claimed would raise billions of dollars for Middle Eastern projects but which never took off and ended after Mr. Trump left office. Mr. Kushner was focused on expanding the Abraham Accords.
Both Mr. Kushner and Mr. Mnuchin started their own private equity firms as soon as they left the government. Soon after, they started courting some of the same governments that had been their official counterparts just a few weeks earlier. Both companies hired members of the Trump administration who were well-known in the Gulf states they were now looking to invest in.
According to internal documents that were leaked last year by The Times, the Saudi Public Investment Fund was considering supporting Mr. Kushner’s Affinity Partners with $2 billion in what Mr. al-Rumayyan referred to as a “strategic” investment by June 2021. This was despite the fact that an investment advisory panel for the fund had advised against providing capital due to Mr. Kushner’s lack of an investment track record and the risks to his public image.
Eventually, the Public Venture Asset’s full board, whose executive is Sovereign Mohammed, Saudi Arabia’s true ruler, casted a ballot to dismiss the counselors’ admonitions and supported the Fondness Accomplices speculation.
Regardless of how well their investments perform, Mr. Kushner and his partners stand to receive fees totaling more than $20 million per year from the Saudi arrangement alone.
According to the documents reviewed by The Times, the Saudi Public Investment Fund also contributed $1 billion to Mr. Mnuchin’s Liberty Strategic Capital fund, albeit on terms less generous than those it had agreed to with Affinity Partners.
Mr. Kushner’s job as a Bay power player was clear in February, at the wedding in Abu Dhabi of Mr. Berkowitz, his partner at Fondness and in the White House.
When Mr. Kushner and Tesla founder Elon Musk were spotted in a V.I.P. suite at the World Cup final match in Doha in December, his connections to Qatar were made public.
Mr. Kushner has told a few group he would rather not be essential for another official mission. However, he has maintained some public ties to Mr. Trump’s most recent presidential campaign. In November, he took an obvious seat in the first line at Mr. Trump’s mission the opening shot occasion at the previous president’s exclusive hangout, Blemish a-Lago.
