‘Money talks’: After building collapse, developer with Trump ties sees opportunity

In the rubble of one of the deadliest building failures in modern history, Hussain Sajwani sees opportunity — a prime beachfront property that could become home to the billionaire Middle East developer’s first project on American soil.

Sajwani, a friend and business partner of Donald Trump known for flashy towers in his native Dubai, has visions of erecting an ultra-luxury condo building in Surfside where Champlain Towers South once stood, a spokesman for his company, DAMAC Properties, confirmed Tuesday. His $120 million bid for the land, one of several competing offers expected to come in, was certified by a judge last month ahead of a court auction early next year.

“We have always considered Miami as a natural fit, given its reputation for being a popular, luxurious destination,” the spokesman, Niall McLoughlin, said in an email.

Sajwani’s resume sparkles with successful projects — dozens of residential developments across the Middle East, partnerships with the fashion houses Versace and Fendi, and two Trump-branded golf courses in Dubai, one of them designed by Tiger Woods. He has a reputation for bold marketing ploys, like offering free Lamborghinis to potential buyers. And he has also grown close to Trump, attending the former president’s inauguration, pitching him on a $2 billion development deal, and becoming a member at his private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach.

At a New Year’s Eve gala at the club in 2016, Trump called Sajwani and his family “the most beautiful people.”

McLoughlin declined to say whether any members of the Trump family could be involved in the project. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump own a condo in a tower two blocks north of the Champlain site. The Trump Organization did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did the Kushner Companies.

The money used to buy the land will compensate survivors and unit owners.

Still, talk of a new tower springing up on the Surfside disaster site is painful for some. Relatives of some of the 98 people killed in the June 24 collapse say they can’t stand the thought of building glitzy condos instead of a memorial honoring those who died.

“It will be a stain on the history of Surfside and the entire country to build a condo on top of such a tragedy, on top of a graveyard,” said David Rodan, who lost his brother and three cousins in the collapse.

But Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Michael Hanzman, who will get the final say, seems set on squeezing maximum value out of the land to benefit victims and their families. Sajwani’s bid set the baseline price for a court auction expected to take place in February as part of a class-action lawsuit being heard before Hanzman.

Four or five other developers, including groups from Miami, New York, Mexico and Canada, are also considering entering bids for the nearly two-acre property, according to Avison Young, the firm marketing the site pro bono for the receiver handling the Champlain Towers South condo association’s finances. Hanzman will decide which bid to accept.

Potential buyers will first need to ensure the site is safe for building. Once they’re granted access to the property, Sajwani’s group will have two months to conduct testing of below-ground conditions and other due diligence. They’ll also need to navigate Surfside’s strict zoning code, which for decades has capped buildings at 12 stories tall and could limit profits.

Sajwani, the lone interested party whose identity has been revealed, is used to getting his way.

In 2011, an Egyptian court handed him and a former tourism minister five-year prison sentences for allegedly colluding on a land deal that would have robbed the public of about $41 million. But DAMAC denied wrongdoing and sued the country through a system known as investor-state dispute settlement, designed to protect foreign investors. Egyptian officials agreed to settle the case, drop Sajwani’s prison sentence and close out probes into other DAMAC land deals.

Reinaldo Borges, a Miami architect who once worked on a project for DAMAC in Dubai, said the quick turn from tragedy to rebuilding feels unique to South Florida.

“This place reinvents itself and heals itself and moves forward,” Borges said. “You could call it optimistic or you could call it naive.”

Building a condo on the site of a deadly disaster, Borges said, brings a certain “karma.”

“I know my wife wouldn’t want to live there,” he said.

‘The most beautiful people’

Now worth $2.5 billion, Sajwani describes himself as a self-made man.

He grew up in a middle-class family in Dubai, his father a trader and shop owner, and attended college in the United States, according to a Forbes profile. After working in the energy industry, he started a catering business that won contracts with the U.S. military and Bechtel, before transitioning to real estate in 1996. Six years later, he founded DAMAC, now a publicly traded company that Sajwani is seeking to take private.

DAMAC sought to attract foreign real estate buyers to Dubai, holding marketing events in China, India, Africa and Europe. On its website, the company lists more than 80 projects in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon and the United Kingdom. The Washington Post called one Sajwani development “the Beverly Hills of Dubai.”

One of his biggest coups was teaming up with the Trump Organization to manage two golf courses in Dubai, nestled among multimillion-dollar Trump-branded villas. In 2014, Trump visited, hitting a golf ball down what would become a fairway of his first business venture in the Arab world.

Sajwani grew closer with Trump after he won the Republican nomination — becoming part of a parade of business owners and political fixers showing up at Trump properties pitching deals and seeking influence.

In 2016, Sajwani attended the opening of Trump’s hotel in Washington, D.C. The billionaire and his family spent the winter holidays at Mar-a-Lago that year. At the club’s New Year’s Eve party, Trump singled out the Sajwanis, lavishing praise on them and Mar-a-Lago, the 126-room crown jewel of his business empire, according to a video obtained by CNN.

“Hussain and the whole family, the most beautiful people, are here from Dubai tonight,” Trump told the reveling crowd. “And they’re seeing it and they’re loving it.”

Two weeks later, Trump said he had rejected a $2 billion deal from Sajwani to avoid potential conflicts of interest in the Middle East — a move he described as unnecessary but prudent.

“I turned it down,” Trump said. “I didn’t have to.”

Undeterred, Sajwani attended the president’s inauguration. “The world is looking forward to a lucrative eight years ahead!” his son, Ali, posted on Instagram. (DAMAC’s spokesman didn’t answer when asked how Sajwani was able to attend the inauguration. Foreign nationals are prohibited from purchasing tickets to such events and must come as the guests of American donors.)

Sajwani also hosted Donald Trump Jr. for a meeting in Dubai where they ate chicken nuggets and talked “new ideas and innovation,” according to the billionaire’s Instagram, and later had Don Jr. and his brother Eric as guests at his daughter’s wedding. Both sons attended the opening of one of Sajwani’s Trump-branded courses, the Trump International Golf Club, where migrant workers went on strike after saying they weren’t being paid on time, according to a 2017 New York Times report. The other Trump course hasn’t yet opened.

And Sajwani kept visiting Mar-a-Lago, spending Easter and Thanksgiving in Palm Beach in 2018. He and his family often stayed in a suite along the Atlantic Ocean favored by the president’s daughter Tiffany.

To club staff, Sajwani fit into a group of what they called “fake members” — people who came to Palm Beach for just a few weekends a year, usually when they knew Trump would be in town, spurred by the chance to mingle with a president and his top aides. This newer class wasn’t there for the pool or the prime rib.

“The face of Mar-a-Lago has changed,” said Ildikó Varga, an early member at the club.

Trump’s partnership with Sajwani has been lucrative.

During his presidential term, Trump’s company earned more than $1.2 million in “management fees” for branding and operating Sajwani’s golf courses, according to his financial disclosures. As a candidate, Trump reported earning between $2 million and $10 million from Sajwani’s firm.

Politics have sometimes gotten in the way.

After candidate Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” DAMAC removed images of Trump from billboards advertising one of the golf course developments.

But otherwise the relationship kept chugging along.

“We made a deal with Trump as an organization; they know how to run golf courses,” Sajwani told Forbes in 2016. “We stay away from politics.”

‘The anti-Dubai’

Sajwani is entering unfamiliar territory as he looks to build for the first time in the United States and wades into the messy politics of a beachfront community of about 6,000 people mourning a tragedy.

McLoughlin, the DAMAC spokesman, said the company is sensitive to the situation.

“We fully understand the emotions surrounding the collapse site and wish to approach the development with full consideration of the community’s benefit,” he said.

On the one hand, Sajwani’s flashy approach could fit well into Miami’s condo market, said South Florida real estate analyst Peter Zalewski.

“The best way to establish street cred as a developer in South Florida is to be overwhelming with the brands you wear, the promises you make, the money you burn,” Zalewski said. “There’s nothing you can say that would be considered hyperbole in the Miami real estate market.”

But Zalewski noted that out-of-town developers often find themselves in over their heads trying to do business in the region.

“We’ve seen this over and over. An out-of-towner comes in, they think they’re smarter, they think they know better — then they do one project and leave,” he said. “It never goes the way you planned.”

Building in Dubai is nothing like building in Surfside, said Borges, the Miami architect who has worked on projects in both cities. The sensibilities in Dubai are similar to those of Donald Trump, he said, with an appreciation for “shiny things” in a “jungle of modern architecture.”

In Surfside, with its strict zoning code, the approach is different.

“Surfside is sort of the anti-Dubai,” Borges said. “You can’t deliver a project that may belong in Dubai and not in Surfside.”

The prospect of a new tower at the Champlain site has driven wedges between various stakeholders, including family members who want a memorial there and some survivors and unit owners who see redeveloping the site as the best way to get compensation.

“I don’t care who buys the property. We’ve just got to get our money,” said Steve Rosenthal, who owned a condo at Champlain Towers South and survived the collapse. Rosenthal has been renting an apartment in Brickell since September. “A lot of us can’t move forward until we know what our money situation is,” he said.

Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett supports the move to sell the property, but says it’s premature to assume it’s safe for construction. The mayor has pressed for months for the town’s hired engineer to be allowed to conduct testing at the site, but access has so far been limited to Miami-Dade police and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the federal agency investigating what caused the collapse.

Judge Hanzman has indicated that others might soon get access, including the town’s engineer, bidders for the property and lawyers for the victims. Sajwani’s group is still waiting its turn, according to Avison Young.

“It’s unclear, given that we have no answer about why the building fell, how a buyer is going to buy a property with that kind of unknown,” Burkett said. “That is the elephant in the room.”

Surfside is also in the midst of a rezoning effort aimed at decreasing density in the town’s oceanfront corridor. Last month, the town commission agreed to make an exception for the Champlain Towers South site after Hanzman blasted a proposal that would have lowered the number of units allowed at a new development.

But some unit owners and family members are pushing for the town to abandon its 12-story height limit, which was in place when Champlain Towers South was built in 1981. (In that case, developers were granted an exception to add a controversial 13th-floor penthouse.)

At a Surfside commission meeting last week, one unit owner suggested the town allow an 18-story tower at the Champlain South site, irking some elected officials. It especially didn’t sit well with Eliana Salzhauer, a commissioner who has questioned the rush to redevelop even after she got flak from Hanzman.

“To undo the quality of life in the town and the flavor of the town in the victims’ ‘memory’ is despicable,” Salzhauer said. “When dollars are on the line, everything goes out the door.”

In addition to money from the property sale, victims will have access to about $48 million from the condo association’s insurance coverage — $30 million for property damage and $18 million for personal injury. But Hanzman says that’s not enough to make them whole. The units were recently appraised at $95.6 million.

If Hanzman stays the course, Sajwani, acting through U.S.-based company East Oceanside Development LLC, will go against other bidders at auction. If the others go above $120 million, Sajwani will have a chance to up his original offer.

But Rodan, the family member of four collapse victims, is still hoping the judge takes another approach. He’s working on a proposal to reserve a quarter of the site for a memorial and upzone the remaining land.

That way, Rodan said, developers could build the same number of units as if they had bought the full plot.

“At the end of the day,” he said, “money talks.”

Miami Herald staff writer Sarah Blaskey contributed to this report.