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We Can Learn A Lot From That Lev Parnas Photo With Ivana Trump

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Jim here.

Yesterday, Shelby Holliday of the Wall Street Journal provided a look at a private Instagram account for Lev Parnas. There is a treasure trove of information in what was revealed there. For this post, I want to concentrate on what appears to be the earliest entry by Parnas, dated April 24, 2015:

There is just so much going on here. As far as I can tell, this is the earliest evidence of Lev Parnas reuniting with any of the Trumps since his time as a teenager working for Kings Road Realty selling co-ops owned by Fred Trump. Recall that evidence is beginning to accumulate that Lev Parnas and David Correia may have been involved in the sale of Trump condos to Russian buyers in South Florida.

But note the date of this encounter: Donald Trump didn’t declare as a presidential candidate until June of 2015, and yet here is Parnas meeting with Ivana in April. As far as I can tell, Parnas began working with the Trumps in 1988. His end date with them is fuzzy, but I’m guessing it went until just before he got his registration as a stockbroker in December of 1993. Donald and Ivana divorced in March of 1992, so there’s a good chance Lev Parnas ran into Ivana while working for them and saw the divorce taking place.

Note that Parnas mentions both the location where they are, Lique, which is a very high end restaurant in the Sunny Isles (yes, that’s where there are a number of Trump high rises) region and Fraud Guarantee. Recall that Fraud Guarantee is the entity that was used to pay Rudy Giuliani at least $500,000 recently. We have to wonder now if those payments started much earlier. Fraud Guarantee was incorporated in October of 2013 in Florida but did not list Parnas or Correia even though they feature as founders on its website. No annual report was filed, so the Florida corporation was dissolved in 2014, before Parnas mentioned it in this post.

Lique is very interesting. From the website, it is clear that it is the background in this photo. The founder, Alex Podolonyy, is Ukranian. In a remarkable parallel to what happened to the Fruad Guarantee website, the bio for Podolonyy is on the Lique site, but the link to it has been removed from the home page.

So, we know that’s Lev Parnas on the left and Ivana Trump next to him. It’s also clear that’s David Correia on the right. One might guess initially that two remaining people are the wives of Parnas and Corriea, but I think that’s only half right. I’m pretty sure that’s Svetlana Parnas next to Correia. It seems that Correia’s wife very likely was indisposed at the time of this photo. She appears to have been sentenced for writing hot checks in October of 2014. There are a couple of lawsuits back and forth between Correia and his then wife, but it looks like after they split she continued her check kiting and even became somewhat notorious.

A hint for the unknown woman between Ivana Trump and Svetlana Parnas in the photo can come to us from the timeline of Parnas and Correia company formation. Just a couple of months prior to this photo, Lev Parnas and David Correia incorporated Mendo Cali, LLC on August 19, 2014. But, as you might recall from my previous post on this issue, there’s a third person involved in this entity: Inna Ponomareva. Subsequent to writing that post, I ran across this remarkable page with a “business card” for Inna Ponomarava as a Vice President of Miama Red Square Realty, the firm most closely associated with the sale of Trump condos to Russians in South Florida. (Hover your cursor over the image to get full color.) Below, I’ve put that image for Ponomareva alongside the unknown person in the photo with Ivana Trump:


Blowing up the Instagram image came at a cost of sharpness, but it sure feels to me that we are seeing Inna Ponomareva alongside Lev Parnas, David Correia and Ivana Trump. And that makes us wonder about just what “#bigbusiness” Parnas was bragging about. I think there’s a good chance it is him getting back to his roots, selling Trump properties.

Do Lev Parnas and David Correia Have A Connection To Sale Of Trump Properties To Russians In South Florida?

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Jim again here. 

Yesterday’s post about Fraud Guarantee, a company started by two of Rudy Guiliani’s clients who were indicted, was so much fun that I decided to do more noodling around in Florida corporate records for Lev Parnas and David Corrieia. As I noted on Twitter this morning, there are many corporate entities associated with Lev Parnas, and yet none of them seem to have active status with the state, including Fraud Guarantee itself:


One of these corporate entities stands out when looking at the names associated with it. Mendo Cali, LLC, near the middle of the list in the tweet, has this information on the state website:


Note the person listed along with Parnas and Correia: Inna Ponomareva. What an interesting-sounding name! When searching that name, especially with a South Florida preference, some interesting hits pop up:

It appears that there is a person by the name of Inna Ponomareva who worked for Miami Red Square Realty. I say worked for because it appears that Miami Red Square also is no longer an active company. Clicking on these links reveals that the real estate listings are no longer active, but it is clear that Ponomareva was associated with listings for these properties with Red Square.

And this is where it gets really interesting. Miami Red Square Realty features prominently in this Washington Post article from just around the 2016 election:

SUNNY ISLES BEACH, Fla. — The first of three identical 45-story Trump-branded condo buildings opened in this oceanfront city at a seemingly terrible time, just as the recession was dawning and the real estate market was starting to crumble.

Many other projects in South Florida floundered in the lead-up to the national housing collapse of 2008. But the Trump buildings were among those that survived, in part because the developers were able to turn to another business source seemingly immune to the factors dragging down the U.S. market: wealthy Russians looking to move their money out of the volatile ­post-Soviet economy.

Hey, that’s pretty interesting. There’s more:

Roman Bokeria, the Georgian-born chief executive of Miami Red Square Realty, said that ­Russian-speaking investors have been attracted to the Trump buildings because they see the brand as a safe place for their money.

“They don’t trust stocks or bonds,” Bokeria said. “They want real estate, something they can see and touch and feel. And for Russians, where is the best real estate? It’s Miami and South Florida. It’s Trump. That is the dream.”

Things get even more interesting from here. Note when Mendo Cali, LLC was incorporated: August of 2014. Just above the passage about Red Square in the Post article, we have this:

Trump does not own these buildings, but, like many Trump projects around the world, he licensed the use of his name and took a percentage of the profits from the initial sales of units. Real estate agents say there have been fewer Russian investors in Florida condos since U.S.-imposed sanctions on Russia took effect in 2014. They predict that the market will improve if Trump wins and reconsiders the sanctions.

Hmm. Things got difficult for Russians wanting to buy US properties in 2014 due to sanctions. But there’s one other interesting development regarding the market for selling Trump properties in South Florida to Russians in 2014. Remember when Reuters came out with their story in 2017 about Russians owning Trump properties? Here are a few snippets:

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump downplayed his business ties with Russia. And since taking office as president, he has been even more emphatic.

“I can tell you, speaking for myself, I own nothing in Russia,” President Trump said at a news conference last month. “I have no loans in Russia. I don’t have any deals in Russia.”

But in the United States, members of the Russian elite have invested in Trump buildings. A Reuters review has found that at least 63 individuals with Russian passports or addresses have bought at least $98.4 million worth of property in seven Trump-branded luxury towers in southern Florida, according to public documents, interviews and corporate records.

The lede here is definitely buried:

The tally of investors from Russia may be conservative. The analysis found that at least 703 – or about one-third – of the owners of the 2044 units in the seven Trump buildings are limited liability companies, or LLCs, which have the ability to hide the identity of a property’s true owner. And the nationality of many buyers could not be determined. Russian-Americans who did not use a Russian address or passport in their purchases were not included in the tally.

What a coincidence! Fully a third of the Trump properties are owned by LLCs so that the identities of the true owners may be obscured. And for the three years leading up to the Reuters analysis, sanctions curtailed ownership by Russians.

The Reuters article goes on to detail one person who was particularly active in the sales of these properties [The Dezer Corporation built the properties under a license from Trump]:

Dezer and Trump got help selling the condos from Elena Baronoff, who immigrated from the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Baronoff, who grew up in Uzbekistan, had been active in Soviet cultural associations. In Miami, she soon began bringing Russian tour groups to Miami.

Gil Dezer’s father, Michael, recruited Baronoff to work alongside the Dezer corporation. She traveled to Moscow, St Petersburg, France and London to bring in Russian buyers, according to Dezer, selling apartments to them for between $1 million and $2 million. Baronoff was diagnosed with Leukemia in 2014 and died a year later.

“She was huge, she was big for them,” Dezer said, referring to Russian buyers. “No one has filled her shoes.”

Hmm. The primary mover and shaker for selling Trump properties in South Florida to Russians took ill in 2014. Although Dezer claims in the article that “No one has filled her shoes” the timing for the incorporation of Mendo Cali, LLC sure fits the window when this market opened up. And Mendo Cali, LLC just happened to have a person with a Russian name and an affiliation with Red Square Realty, which sold Trump properties to Russians. I’m sure this is just an innocent coincidence.

Update October 13

From a Washington Post article put Saturday evening, October 12:

Parnas, 47, was born in Ukraine but moved with his family to the United States as a child and grew up in Brooklyn. He told The Washington Post in an interview conducted before his arrest that he got his start in real estate, selling Trump condos for Donald Trump’s father, Fred, then worked in shipping in the former Soviet Union before becoming a securities trader. He moved to Florida in the mid-1990s.

Isn’t that interesting? We now have a connection between Parnas and the Trump family that started decades ago. And that connection is Parnas selling Trump-branded condos.