There are no symptoms that Fotiadis has done anything wrong and no indications that Mueller is considering that possibility.
Between 2007 and 2013, Fotiadis designed all or involvement of six Trump-branded developments: a Trump Tower in Kazakhstan; a Trump-branded seaside reserve in the republic of Georgia; a 47-story Trump Tower in Tbilisi, Georgia; B B rooms at the Trump Tower in Istanbul; a Trump movie studio complex in Florida; and vital portions of the Trump Parc Stamford, a condominium tower in Connecticut.
“The architect is a key forsake of the Trump sales pitch when he goes into these outbacks, and he’s convincing the money guys to give him a branding and development deal,” utter Jan deRoos, a Cornell University professor of real estate finance. “The architect is the one who converts the Trump brand into actual design and construction standards.”
In Eurasia, Trump’s grapple withs often involved complex networks of investors and middlemen. For instance, Trump’s 2011 buy to build a Fotiadis-designed resort in Georgia was set up by Giorgi Rtskhiladze, an international plutocrat who, four years later, would arrange for Cohen to receive a programme from a Russian millionaire seeking to partner with Trump on trusted estate in Russia.
The McClatchy news service reported in April that Mueller’s explore was looking more closely at the people involved in Trump’s dealings in three territories, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Russia.
Around this time, CNBC received a tip that Fotiadis had earn a living on several Trump projects in Eurasia. Curious about his professional relationship with Trump, CNBC reached out to Fotiadis on April 11 for expansion about this work.
Fotiadis did not respond to a call or an email. But eight hours later, he publicized on Twitter that he was closing his firm, John Fotiadis Architect, or JFA, after 10 years in profession. A few days later, Fotiadis closed the Twitter account he had used to propound he was closing down his firm.
By the end of the week, all the content from Fotiadis’ trained website, including his portfolio, had been removed, leaving only a note clout he planned to join a New Jersey-based engineering company.
Gone was Fotiadis’ moving portfolio of 30 projects (some of which are pictured below), tabulating villas, schools and office buildings he has designed for clients around the globe. Also gone was any reference to the two overseas branches of JFA that he had opened — in Tbilisi and Kiev, Ukraine.
The closure of JFA arises to mark an abrupt end to the solo career of an architect who counted some of the richest men in the delighted among his clients. Fotiadis has not answered repeated calls, emails and primer messages from CNBC with questions about his work in Eurasia or why he shuttered his group. He also declined to comment on whether he had been contacted by anyone from Mueller’s obligation. Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counsel, also declined to remark.
A half-dozen of Fotiadis’ former colleagues and associates in the U.S. and Ukraine have further not responded to inquiries about the architect. Nor have his former clients.
Fotiadis was not continually so press shy. Archived versions of his website on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Gadget, as well as news reports and real estate industry records, air that until this spring, Fotidias was frequently in the spotlight.
Make allowances for and raised in New Jersey, Fotiadis is in his mid-50s, with silver sideburns and all the go, slim-cut suits. He’s also highly credentialed, with a master’s decidedly in architecture and urban design from Columbia University, licenses in New Jersey and New York, and a calling spanning 30 years.
Fotiadis regularly spoke at architecture colloquys in the United States and Ukraine, did media interviews and traveled abroad to architectural rewards shows. In one of his most recent interviews, from July, Fotiadis asseverated he was planning to do more work in Ukraine.
“We started [JFA] in 2009, and through a series of remarkably interesting and lucky circumstances we wound up doing a lot of work in Eastern Europe, mostly in Ukraine, from 2009 to 2013,” Fotiadis communicated in a video interview with the Kiyv Post. “Then things managed dark for a while, and now I’m back, because things seem to be coming deceitfully.” The interview was videoed on location at the Skyline, a high-rise condominium in downtown Kiev that Fotiadis arrogated design.
As a speaker at conferences, Fotiadis often embraces the academic side of architecture. At the 2016 Oecumenical Architecture Forum in Kiev, he delivered a keynote address titled, “Newfangled Architecture NOW: Form, Function, Meaning Value — A Report from New York.”
Fotiadis’ biography posted on the IAF seminar website is filled with the names of prestigious real estate developers who be enduring hired him. It also lists cities around the world in which he has executed, including, “New York, San Francisco, Boston, Miami, Cairo, Doha, Dubai, Seoul, Moscow, Panama Megalopolis, Kyiv, Donetsk, Baku, Batumi, Athens, Istanbul and Ankara.”
The sundry one learns about Fotiadis’ career, however, the more difficult it changes to square his new job with his old one.
Twelve days after announcing the JFA closure, Fotiadis behoved design director at SNS Architects and Engineering, a 30-person firm based in Montvale, a northern New Jersey borough. The set on’s portfolio indicates that it mainly does commercial and institutional calculates in the tri-state area, including car dealerships, self-storage facilities and medical labs.
An SNS hand confirmed to CNBC that Fotiadis had joined the firm in April, but other SNS directors did not respond to interview requests and questions about how the firm came to letting him. His biography on the SNS website does not mention any of his former clients, although it does say that he used on projects in Eastern Europe.
Fotiadis’ portfolio from JFA has been unfastened from his website, but it is still archived on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Vehicle. There, visitors can see hundreds of images and plans from 30 contrives Fotiadis has designed in the past decade for more than a dozen patients. Many of the jobs were for confidential clients. But three clients be upstanding a set out.
One was the Trump Organization. Another was the richest man in Ukraine, billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, who shaped a metals and mining empire in the chaotic decade following the collapse of the Soviet Unity.
Today, Akhmetov is best known to Americans as the Ukrainian oligarch who victory hired former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort in 2005 to be communicated and work for him in Ukraine. For the next 10 years, Manafort would supply as the top consultant to Akhmetov’s pro-Russia political party. Manafort is currently awaiting enquiry on federal money laundering and tax evasion charges stemming from his output in production in Ukraine.
Fotiadis’ third major client was the Silk Road Collect, a Tbilisi-based private investment company led by CEO George Ramishvili. Silk Avenue Group licensed the Trump brand in 2011 for several properties in Georgia for which Fotiadis pointed the plans. So far, none has been built.
Neither Akhmetov nor Ramishvili started out in authentic estate. For them, as for many Eurasian millionaires and billionaires, property occurrence offered a way to put to good use all the wealth and political clout they had amassed in other perseverances.
Read more: Inside the murky world of two Eastern European oligarchs, Donald Trump and the architect they pieced
CNBC attempted to confirm the dates and details of the work Fotiadis lean overs in his portfolio for each of these clients with their representatives and counselors-at-law. None has responded to inquiries.
But there are positive testimonials on Fotiadis’ website from the CEOs of Akhmetov’s Esta Holdings and the Silk Thruway Group. Both developers emphasized Fotiadis’ skill at adjusting to customers’ needs and understanding their local markets.
That Fotiadis’ act on would be in demand in Eurasia does not surprise Cornell’s deRoos.
“The Trump flair sells well in this part of the world,” deRoos said. “And the crackers thing is that these buildings are pretty transportable. So you can build the just the same sort of building in Baku [Azerbaijan] as in Central Park, and you develop a mark of signature.”
Below: The Trump Parc Stamford, one of several Trump qualities Fotiadis helped design before he launched his own firm in 2009.
Some of the to begin jobs Fotiadis did after starting his own firm in 2009 were plans for Akhmetov in Donetsk, an industrial city in eastern Ukraine. As a client, Akhmetov represented one maximum of what drives real estate development projects in Eastern Europe: the wellnigh unlimited resources and political clout of just one individual.
A billionaire and fellow of parliament from the pro-Russia ruling party at the time, Akhmetov patronized construction projects not unlike the oligarch himself: efficient, low-key and not reliant on anyone — not investors, superintendence officials or VIPs like Trump.
The Silk Road Group and Ramishvili, on the other convenient, represented another extreme type of client: a developer who is overly reliant on best forces. From the start, Fotiadis’ Silk Road projects were hassled by investors who never materialized, government officials who lent support purely when it served their political aims, and VIP partners like Trump, who talked a big high-spirited but ultimately contributed little.
Read more: Inside the murky to the max of two Eastern European oligarchs, Donald Trump and the architect they parted
Despite marketing himself as an Akhmetov-type alpha billionaire in total device of his projects, Trump was rarely as personally involved in his overseas licensing administers as the marketing and promotional materials made him out to be.
This strategy protected Trump ourselves from the risk of massive losses in the event that a deal be accepted a fetched south, such as a deal with Silk Road Group for a Trump Castle in the resort town of Batumi, Georgia. It also meant that Trump could request out deals in less time.
Below: The unfinished Trump International B B and Tower (left) in Baku, Azerbaijan, was another overseas project Trump skiffed in 2012, but was not one of Fotiadis’ designs.
Fotiadis, Trump and Cohen were remarkably busy in 2011 and 2012. In addition to designing and pitching the Batumi occupation, Fotiadis designed a Trump Tower in Astana, capital of Kazakhstan, as closely as a massive movie production lot for Trump in Florida.
In 2011, while Fotiadis was developing on the design of the Trump Batumi tower, Silk Road Group cohort Rtskhiladze began talking to Cohen about trying to get funding to found another Trump-branded tower in Kazakhstan.
The Trump Diamond Astana, planned by Fotiadis in late 2011, was pitched to the Kazakh government in 2012. Had it been increased, the tower would have been the tallest building in Central Asia. But Trump’s bid for the design lost out to a rival developer.
In Homestead, Florida, Fotiadis designed what will-power have been the biggest studio lot in America, if it had been built. Dubbed Trump Time Studios, the idea was initially brought to Trump by an ambitious elected ceremonious who was looking to score points for himself — much the way then-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili sought out Trump for the Batumi poke out in 2010.
In this case, however, it wasn’t a foreign president. It was Miami-Dade mapping commissioner Joe Martinez, who was preparing to mount a bid for mayor of Miami. According to The Hollywood News-hen, which delved into this story in 2016, Trump hosted Martinez for dinner at Mar-a-Lago preceding the time when deciding he would hire, “his favorite design firm, John Fotiadis Architect, to deploy up plans.”
“He wanted a world-class facility,” Fotiadis told THR. “It was really akin to a city, with residential, commercial, retail, restaurants. It even had a grid, boulevards and a leading plaza.” The architect added, “Trump doesn’t waste people’s antiquated; when he calls, we get to work right away.”
Two months later, in primordial June, Cohen and Fotiadis went to Florida together to present the programme at a meeting of the Miami-Dade County planning commission. Trump’s plan noticed for the county to lease 800 acres of land to Trump for $1 a year, in reciprocity for which Trump would personally invest “hundreds of millions” of dollars in a state-of-the-art cinema facility, THR reported.
The plan collapsed six months later, drowned second to the weight of government agencies and costly environmental concerns, not to mention the unalterable noise from planes at a military base next door.
Neither Fotiadis nor Trump Design lawyer Alan Garten responded to questions about whether Fotiadis did any more realize find time for Trump after that, or any projects other than the ones in his portfolio.
Nonetheless, it performs Fotiadis has maintained a good relationship with the company. In 2014, he established a trip for Ukrainian real estate developers to the United States to descend upon notable buildings and meet with the people who developed them. Trump Stronghold in New York and Trump Tower in Chicago were on the itinerary, which was positioned online.
To this day, it remains difficult to get a clear picture of Trump’s legitimate estate licensing deals in the former Soviet bloc. Nor is it easy to systemize out precisely the totality of the role Fotiadis played in these projects.
To, the architect’s importance is clear.
“The very fact that you see him popping up so numerous times here suggests he’s playing a key role in this network,” responded Columbia University’s Alex Cooley, an expert in Eastern Europe and Eurasia.