For Georgia's president, it was a chance to show that his country, the former Soviet republic, is grand enough to attract the world's best-known real estate developer. And for that developer,
Donald J. Trump, it was yet another opportunity to demonstrate that he is world class. In a ceremony with caviar and wine at
Trump Tower in Manhattan on Thursday, Mr. Trump signed a deal to develop the two tallest towers in the republic of Georgia, the former Soviet state at the nexus of Eastern Europe and Western Asia. Giving his blessing to the deal was
Mikheil Saakashvili, the flamboyant, English-speaking president of Georgia. Mr. Saakashvili is eager to attract foreign investment as he tries to yank his impoverished country from the Russian orbit and align it more closely with the United States. Mr. Trump, the world's first virtual developer, will not actually build the towers. At this point in his career, he is more inclined to license use of the Trump name on someone else's building than develop a property himself. [...] Any actual construction, if it begins as scheduled in 2013, would be overseen by
Giorgi Ramishvili, chairman of the
Silk Road Group, one of the largest private investment companies in the south Caucasus region. The deal, which the partners estimate at $300 million, calls for two projects. The
Trump Tower Tbilisi would go up on Rose Revolution Square in Georgia's capital. The
Trump Riviera would be part of a planned Silk Road complex that includes a casino, an exhibition hall and a marina, in the resort city of Batumi on the Black Sea, near Turkey. The residential buildings will each contain 100 apartments and rise nearly 40 stories -- average by New York standards, but nearly twice the size of the republic's tallest structures. [...] In Georgia, Mr. Trump will license his name, and his company will manage the two properties. He will also work with Silk Road to line up financing for the projects and market the towers. Mr. Trump said that so far he had no plans to put his own cash into the deal. [...] Mr. Saakashvili has been eager to draw celebrity foreign investors to show Georgia is again open for business, after the global recession and a war with Russia in 2008 dried up the foreign direct investment that had been propelling the economy. [...] Before the Russian war, Georgia had attracted about $2 billion a year in foreign investment. Mr. Saakashvili welcomed the inflow as an endorsement of his pro-Western reforms. During the crisis, Georgia pivoted to work with Middle Eastern investors like the sovereign wealth fund of Ras al-Khaimah, one of the United Arab Emirates. That fund bought the Georgian port of Poti on the coast just north of the site of Mr. Trump's planned tower in Batumi. [...] While Mr. Trump is the first large American developer to come to Georgia, some locals have worked with American partners or financing from United States banks, Irakli Matkava, a deputy minister of economy, said in a telephone interview. Silk Road, which recently opened the Radisson Tbilisi hotel in the capital, expects to open another hotel, the Batumi Radisson this summer. Tourism is a relative new field for Silk Road, which is a major fuel trader and transporter, and also the largest Internet provider in Georgia. The company also has a contract to move American military equipment to Afghanistan from Iraq.
The Georgians seem to have had their eye on the Trump clan for some time. Two years ago,
Giorgi Rtskhiladze, an assistant to the chairman of Silk Road, invited Mr. Trump's Czech-born ex-wife, Ivana Trump, to Georgia to consider investing there. (New York Times, March 11, 2011)