Former Trump official Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of former President Donald Trump, is using his past work in the White House as an asset for investors in his new Affinity Partners investment fund.
Saudi Arabia appears to be banking on Donald Trump’s return to office by refusing to help the US punish Russia for the Ukraine invasion, and by placing $2bn in a new, untested investment fund run by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
In seeking to persuade Riyadh to increase oil production to lower prices by as much as 30%, and thereby curb Russian government revenue, the Biden administration is looking for ways to reassure the Saudi government that it is dedicated to the kingdom’s security.
The Intercept has obtained a slide deck from Affinity Partners that pitches Kushner's experience cutting deals with the governments of Russia and Saudi Arabia as something that should give investors confidence that their money will be well spent.
In particular, the slide deck touts Kushner's role in negotiating an oil production cut with those two nations in the spring of 2020 in a bid to stabilize rapidly collapsing oil prices at the start of the novel coronavirus pandemic.
Kushner has come under scrutiny after the Saudi government invested $2 billion with Affinity Partners, despite the fact that a panel screening the prospective investment warned that Kushner did not have sufficient experience in this particular field.
The kingdom’s de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, reportedly declined to take a call from Joe Biden last month, showing his displeasure at the administration’s restrictions on arms sales; what he saw as its insufficient response to attacks on Saudi Arabia by Houthi forces in Yemen; its publication of a report into the Saudi regime’s 2018 murder of the dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi; and Biden’s prior refusal to deal in person with the crown prince.
Instead, Prince Mohammed shows signs of betting on the return to office of Trump in 2024, and the resumption of the Trump administration’s cosy relationship with Riyadh.
There have been calls for an investigation into the huge investment made by the Saudi Public Investment Fund, controlled by Prince Mohammed, in Affinity Partners, a private equity firm set up by Jared Kushner months after he left the White House and his job as special adviser to Trump, his father-in-law.
In doing so, the kingdom’s de facto ruler ignored the warnings of the Saudi fund’s own advisory panel. It worried about Affinity’s inexperience: Kushner was in real estate before his White House stint, and his track record of investments was widely considered not particularly good. It was concerned that the new company’s due diligence on operations was “unsatisfactory in all aspects”, and that it was charging “excessive” fees, according to a report in the New York Times.
