Trump Organization expands in India, where many of its partners face accusations

“We’re incredibly excited to launch our second project in Gurgaon," Eric Trump, who runs day-to-day operations, using the former name for the city near New Delhi. “And even prouder to be doing it once again with our amazing partners."

Those partners, 30-something Pankaj Bansal and his billionaire father and uncle, are accused by Indian authorities of helping another developer launder around $46 million cheated from customers, according to police reports and court documents.

Authorities said there is evidence that suggests the Bansals were involved in bribing a judge connected to that case, and in another case, are accused by authorities of working with officials to illegally acquire land. If convicted of the money-laundering offenses, they face up to seven years in prison.

None of the accusations are related to Trump projects, and the Trump Organization itself faces no accusation of wrongdoing in India.

But property moguls the company has worked with there—the Bansal family being just one—have faced accusations of a number of crimes, including money laundering, securities fraud, bribery, tax evasion and stealing from home purchasers.

India has become the Trump Organization’s biggest foreign market for real-estate projects since the presidential election, with nine projects completed or under development.

Some Trump projects elsewhere around the world have faced problems, including in Azerbaijan, where the company walked away from a tower constructed by a politically sensitive partner. Charges of bribery also marred a hotel project in Brazil, and the Trump Organization later pulled out. In India, nearly every project has partners that have been accused of wrongdoing. Such allegations are widespread across the country’s real-estate industry.

India projects generated more than $12 million in fees for the Trump Organization last year, a major portion of the $44.6 million in foreign licensing and development fees earned that year by the company, according to President Trump’s most recent income disclosure statement.

The new 51-story Gurugram project announced by Eric Trump in April, on a dusty patch of land on the city’s outskirts, was put on a fast track late last year to capitalize on Trump’s election win, and its planned luxury apartments sold out in five hours, marketing agents say.

The Trump Organization’s focus on India—considered to have significant corruption by the Berlin-based advocacy group Transparency International—comes as the Trump administration reins in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a law that seeks to prosecute corruption by U.S. companies or their partners abroad. The president has criticized the law as anticompetitive.

The company’s India expansion also comes as the Trump administration negotiates with New Delhi over possible revisions to tariffs that could make or break parts of India’s economy, after Trump increased duties on Indian imports to 50% this year.

The push underscores how the Trump Organization has abandoned the self-imposed restrictions on overseas ventures that characterized the first Trump term. After Trump won the first time, his company put a halt to new foreign deals to avoid the appearance of possible conflicts of interest.

In his second term, the Trump Organization has shed those guardrails, partly because Trump and other family members believe they got no credit for pulling back last time. The Trumps, feeling that they’re going to be criticized one way or the other, have moved ahead with projects in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Asia.

“I tried to do everything right in 2016 and I got very little credit for it," Eric Trump said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in October. “We still kind of got stomped on."

The Trump Organization didn’t respond to requests for comment.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said neither the “president nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest."

Yateesh Wahaal, a director representing the Bansals at their firm M3M, said they deny any wrongdoing and didn’t want to comment on the specifics of current legal proceedings. “We have complete faith in the Indian judicial system and are confident that the ongoing proceedings will continue to reaffirm our integrity and law-abiding record," Wahaal said.

Seized Ferrari

The Trump Organization’s India projects stand out for the number of active criminal and regulatory cases facing the company’s partners on other projects.

In two separate projects, the developers were accused of violating building codes. The founder of another firm was accused of securities fraud, and another Indian partner faced allegations of corruptly working with government officials to win access to land.

The alleged wrongdoing by the Bansals—the Trump Organization’s most active partner in India—hasn’t been widely reported in the U.S.

One investigation into the family has become one of the highest profile cases of Indian developers allegedly cheating customers—in this case, 640 of them. In raids on developer offices and the Bansals’ homes—on three floors atop a skyscraper on a manicured golf estate outside New Delhi—investigators seized cash, jewelry and a Ferrari, a Lamborghini and a Bentley.

In India, as in other countries, the Trump Organization sells the rights to use its brand in return for fees, leaving the purchase of land and financing and development of towers to local developers. It also frequently collects management fees for taking a role in the design and construction of buildings.

The Trumps have followed that model in more than a half-dozen projects in India over the past decade, including two completed luxury residential towers in the cities of Mumbai and Pune, and two others that are nearly finished in Kolkata and Gurugram.

Many of the Indian partners, including the Bansals, were connected to the Trumps via Kalpesh Mehta, a Wharton-educated financier who has served as the Trump Organization’s representative in India and has helped the family get things done there.

Mehta and Donald Trump Jr. have developed a close relationship, with the president’s son publicly describing his India middleman as a close friend. Mehta, who hasn’t been accused of misdeeds, attended the president’s inauguration.

Mehta didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Mehta and the Bansals are central to both Trump-branded projects in Gurugram, a satellite city of New Delhi that officially changed its name from Gurgaon a decade ago but has struggled to shake off the original. The city has become one of India’s biggest business centers, with blue-chip U.S. firms such as Microsoft and Google establishing offices there.

It is the hometown of the Bansals, and their power and wealth are seen on advertisements and murals and via their foundation, which has pledged to plant hundreds of thousands of trees across India to help cut greenhouse gases.

The Bansals’ first project with the Trumps in Gurugram, called Trump Towers Delhi NCR, an abbreviation for National Capital Region, is a set of twin 600-feet residential towers located on the city’s fringes amid a patchwork of shantytowns, newer housing and trash-strewn dirt roads.

The sales launch of the second Gurugram project—the April announcement—caught a wave of excitement around President Trump’s return to the White House. The success helped propel Pankaj Bansal, whose father and uncle are prominent in India but not internationally, into the global elite.

In June, Pankaj Bansal embarked on a trip across the U.S., visiting the White House and meeting Donald Trump Jr. in West Palm Beach. He hobnobbed in New York City with Eric Trump and Mehta and snapped a photograph at a conference on U.S.-India relations in Washington with the second lady, Usha Vance.

Donald Trump Jr. has likened the Bansals to his own family, describing them as “an excellent team with strong family values and a rich legacy."

Opportunities in India

The Trumps began expressing interest in India as far back as 2007, when Donald Trump Jr. extolled the country’s opportunities during a speech at a property conference in Mumbai. He told local press that the Trump Organization hoped to do its first real-estate deal there within 18 months.

It took another four years before the organization started marketing a deal. Donald Trump Jr. later described those initial years as hard. Indian entrepreneurs would pitch to develop land, claiming to have market knowledge and credentials from Ivy League universities, Donald Trump Jr. told a video podcast in 2021. But then he’d arrive in India and find the land wasn’t owned by the entrepreneur, who had just fabricated high-profile connections to get the Trump Organization to India to talk business, he told the podcast, which was run by a marketing agency connected to Mehta.

“It was difficult to come in as an outsider," Donald Trump Jr. said.

The Trump Organization’s first effort in Mumbai more than a decade ago illustrated the point. The U.S. firm tied up with a local developer, Rohan Lifescapes, to build a Trump-branded residential tower overlooking the Arabian Sea.

Soon after, Rohan was accused by a state lawmaker of colluding with officials to sign off on design plans that violated building codes, according to the lawmaker and Indian press reports at the time. The project was put on hold by local officials. Rohan has acknowledged the designs violated permissions.

Donald Trump Jr. flew to Mumbai in early 2012 to lobby to salvage it, meeting with Prithviraj Chavan, the then-chief minister for the state where Mumbai is located, Maharashtra.

The former state minister told the Journal that he politely declined to waive building-code rules for the Trump Organization to allow the construction. “There’s no question of changing the rules for anybody," Chavan said he told his American visitor.

Since then, Donald Trump Jr. has publicly described the deal as a disaster, and the tower was never built. But he has also said there was a silver lining: Mehta was working for Rohan at the time, and the two men developed a bond over the failed deal.

Donald Trump Jr. liked that Mehta was transparent about Rohan’s violations. Mehta “could have kept me in the dark, tried to cover up some of the nonsense," Donald Trump Jr. told the marketing agency podcast in 2021. He added that Mehta “really helped me get through and navigate those waters and meet the people that we’ve ended up making incredible partnerships [with]."

‘Tribeca’ middleman

Mehta, who grew up in India but had U.S. experience working for Carlyle and Lehman Brothers, soon after decided to leverage the trust he had built with Donald Trump Jr. to start his own real-estate business. He called it Tribeca, because he had previously lived in New York’s hip neighborhood and it went well with the Trump brand, he told the same video podcast that featured Donald Trump Jr.

Mehta didn’t have land or capital, but he had an understanding of the Indian market and could connect the Trumps to players on the ground who did, Mehta told the podcast. He wanted to sell a luxury lifestyle in keeping with the Trump brand by partnering with land owners and developers who could work through local complexities.

“I get it, I’m investing in you," Donald Trump Jr. said he told Mehta at the time, according to the podcast. “That’s where we’re putting our brand."

From that point on, Mehta began marketing himself as the Trump Organization’s representative in India. For its next project, a Mumbai residential tower, the organization licensed its brand to a property developer called Lodha Group, whose billionaire founder is a prominent member of India’s current ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP.

Lodha Group for years had faced allegations of misconduct. Its 2009 initial public offering draft prospectus listed 308 different criminal proceedings outstanding against the company, its founders and subsidiaries, and dozens of other civil cases and tax disputes that Lodha flagged as potential risks ahead of a share sale.

In 2013, politicians from the BJP’s main rival party held a press conference accusing Lodha of building violations across a series of large-scale projects, urging the state to take action. Lodha Group described the allegations as politically motivated, and no action was taken.

Donald Trump, before starting his first presidential campaign, flew to India in 2014 to launch the Trump project. “It has been my desire for many years to be involved in a great project in Mumbai," he said. The tower was completed in 2021.

The Trump Organization then set its sights on expanding beyond Mumbai’s Maharashtra state and began discussions with developers, including one called RDB Group, in Kolkata, in eastern India. At the time, RDB’s founder and then-chairman had been barred by India’s securities regulator from engaging in the stock market for four years for misleading investors in a listing of a subsidiary. RDB appealed the decision to a higher court, but it was upheld.

The Trump Organization signed a deal with RDB and another Indian developer in 2016 to build Trump Tower Kolkata, a 38-story residential building. The project is now nearing completion.

‘Men, Materials and Money’

After the 2016 election, the Trump Organization pulled away from new overseas deals. But this self-imposed restriction didn’t include deals already in progress, and many of its India ventures fell into this category.

By 2018, the Trump Organization had two projects under development in Gurugram. One was an office tower designed by Foster + Partners, the London firm that designed Apple’s U.S. headquarters. It was to be built in partnership with an Indian private-equity company called IREO that has a history of dealings with the Bansal family.

The other was a residential building called Trump Towers Delhi NCR, to be developed in direct partnership with the Bansals and their firm, M3M. Mehta became a joint licensee with M3M, with a stake in the project, according to President Trump’s disclosure.

The Bansal family and M3M—which stands for Magnificence in the Trinity of Men, Materials and Money—had worked for decades in Gurugram. Brothers Basant and Roop Bansal had started out by buying and selling land before moving into development in the 2000s, later with Basant’s son, Pankaj, according to Gurugram residents.

Former land owners have complained to local authorities and in interviews with the Journal that they were encouraged by the Bansals to sell parcels to M3M after they said the Bansals and others spread rumors the state government was planning to forcefully acquire their land below market rates.

“We panicked," Lala Ram Tyagi, who sold land to the Bansals in the mid-2000s, said in an interview.

M3M also caught the eye of tax investigators, who raided its office in 2011 over unpaid obligations; the Bansals later repaid some taxes. In 2017, police investigators accused M3M of using an employee to bribe a forestry official in order to illegally fell more than 2,000 trees on their land, according to a police complaint. M3M was later fined.

Still, the Bansals were established developers in Gurugram, with a large land bank. The Trump Organization dispatched two executives involved in design and construction to India to review designs for the residential project with M3M.

After President Trump left the White House in 2021, the Trump Organization revived its global expansion efforts. For example, it cut a deal to manage and brand a $500 million golf and resort project in Oman. The company also began mapping out more aggressive plans for new India projects.

New allegations

In 2021, Indian financial investigators alleged wrongdoing at real-estate projects involving IREO, arrested the company’s founder and accused him of cheating customers.

The private-equity firm worked with the Trump Organization on the Foster-designed commercial tower in Gurugram, which never progressed to construction. The IREO alleged wrongdoing was unrelated to the Trump project, and there were no allegations of wrongdoing by the Trump Organization.

In June 2023, the IREO case expanded, and authorities raided the Bansal homes on the top floors of the golf estate tower, a project itself developed by M3M in Gurugram. They accused M3M and its directors of helping IREO launder some of the roughly $160 million that was allegedly taken from roughly 640 customers who had invested in properties that IREO failed to deliver after roughly five years.

According to prosecutors’ allegations in court documents, IREO invested four billion Indian rupees, around $46 million, via shell companies in the rights to develop land owned by M3M that was worth only about 1% of that, or 40 million rupees. Money from IREO customers was used for the investment, but the land wasn’t developed and the investment in development rights was written down over time by IREO to reflect the land’s true value, prosecutors allege.

Roop Bansal benefited from the proceeds of crime, according to prosecutors.

A lawyer for IREO denied wrongdoing and said that no criminal case existed against his client. He said no customer money was involved in the deal between M3M and IREO, calling the money-laundering allegations baseless, and said the company’s projects are all now either completed or in the final stages of delivery, with no current complaints from customers.

As authorities investigated the alleged wrongdoing by M3M and IREO, they also found evidence that suggested Roop Bansal and M3M had bribed a judge related to the case.

M3M employed the judge’s nephew as a legal adviser as compensation for favors in the court where the judge was hearing cases, according to a police report and court documents related to that case. Roop Bansal and the judge were recorded talking, with the judge saying he spoke to the Bansals only through the nephew’s phone, according to the police complaint. The judge also received compensation from M3M via a friend who transferred money from M3M to the bank accounts of the judge’s nephew and two other relatives, according to a disciplinary document filed by judicial officials.

Basant, Roop and Pankaj Bansal were all arrested by authorities in June 2023, with their cases covered widely in India’s press. The three face allegations including money laundering, bribery and criminal conspiracy.

Wahaal said the arrests of the Bansals were ruled to be illegal by the Supreme Court of India, because they violated due process.

The judge accused of receiving a bribe has denied ever interacting with M3M directors and claims that recordings and screenshots of exchanges showing he took a bribe are fake. His legal team said he didn’t make any decisions in any M3M case. “It’s a fake and fabricated case by the state and anticorruption bureau," one of his lawyers said on Thursday.

Accelerated push

Eric Trump, who took on day-to-day operations of the Trump Organization from Donald Trump Jr. in President Trump’s first term, indicated in early 2024 that the company might again back away from new foreign deals if his father won re-election that year.

But as the vote approached, sentiment inside the company appeared to change. Since the election, the Trump Organization and its partners have announced 12 international real-estate projects, with five in India, including the Trump Residences Gurgaon announced in April and projects in several other Indian cities. All 12 were under contract before November, according to a Trump representative. The Indian projects have gained new traction with Trump’s win, which lifted his stature and brand value, Mehta told local media.

By that time, the Bansals had become embroiled in another investigation by federal authorities, reflecting the years-old complaints by landowners.

Authorities in the summer of 2024 seized land owned by M3M after naming the company as one of 15 developers in Gurugram that had colluded with the state government from 2007 to 2012 to issue acquisition notices that forced landowners to sell at below-market rates, according to a police report and a statement by India’s financial enforcement agency. Government officials financially gained from the criminal conspiracy, according to the police report.

Mehta, the Bansals and the Trump Organization pushed ahead with the launch of Trump Residences Gurgaon, clocking more than $300 million in apartment sales, according to Mehta. Just a few miles away, Trump Towers Delhi NCR, the first Trump project with the Bansals to get built in Gurugram, is nearly ready for residents to move in.