Shady Russian Network Behind Trump Vanity Project Exposed

Donald Trump’s sons are building a skyscraper in the Caucasus with a company co-owned by an oligarch who has shady ties to Russia.

Trump Tower Tbilisi, a 70-story luxury apartment complex planned for the capital of Georgia, a former Soviet republic at the far reaches of Eastern Europe, is the latest jewel in the first family’s $2.7 billion property empire. Eric Trump, 42, posted an AI rendering on X in May, gushing that it “marks our first project in the region” and that “we are so excited to bring it to life!”

President Trump, 80, has for years waved off scrutiny of his Russia ties as a Democratic hoax. Vladimir Putin meddled in the 2016 election to help him win, and the Trump Organization chased a Trump Tower Moscow deal deep into that campaign. The FBI later pored over the post-Soviet money men behind Trump SoHo—a Manhattan condo-hotel built with the Sapir Organization, now the Trumps’ American partner on the Tbilisi development project.

One of the Georgian groups the Trump Organization named on the project, Biograpi Living, is co-owned by 70-year-old Paata Gamgoneishvili, a joint investigation by the Daily Beast’s sister Substack PunchUp and The Newsground can reveal.

The Georgian-born oligarch made his fortune in Russia, working alongside his business partner of more than 25 years, Russian investor Roland Isaev, 60. Biograpi now insists it has nothing at all to do with the deal, despite featuring prominently in the Trumps’ announcement and promoting the tower on its own social media accounts.

Gamgoneishvili started out as a Moscow trader during the collapse of the Soviet Union and got his break from the Kremlin in 1993, when Boris Yeltsin ended a standoff with Russia’s parliament by shelling it with tanks. Gamgoneishvili backed the then-president through a union of Afghan war veterans and was handed a state medal for it, Forbes Russia reported.

Yeltsin rewarded the veterans movement with lucrative import perks, and parts of it later curdled into an organized crime racket. Gamgoneishvili ran his own trading business under the union’s wing and rode the same wave to a shopping mall fortune, much of it built with Isaev. Two of his Moscow malls alone sold to an Austrian fund for around $230 million in 2006. The pair wound up among residents of Rublyovka, a gated forest enclave of the Kremlin elite that’s home to Vladimir Putin’s official residence.

Investigative outlet Bivol tied Gamgoneishvili and Isaev in 2019 to the network behind an alleged scheme that siphoned tens of millions of dollars out of the Bulgarian arm of Russian oil giant Lukoil. The year before, a TV journalist who had hosted Bivol’s reporters for a segment about the wider scandal was found murdered. Authorities said her killing was not connected to her work—a conclusion Bivol’s editor disputed.

Czech and Bulgarian reporters also outed Gamgoneishvili as the co-financier of a 2018 attempt to buy parts of Bulgaria’s power grid, revealing his companies held roughly $123 million at Sberbank, Russia’s largest state bank, plus around $80 million more at two private Swiss lenders. Leaked Russian banking records show he was still earning interest on an estimated $375,000 in a Sberbank account as recently as February 2025, three years after the West blacklisted it over Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. A separate set of records shows Isaev collecting interest on an estimated $250,000 at Alfa Bank, another sanctioned lender.

Biograpi, the group named in the Trumps’ announcement, is half-owned by the Pkhakadze family, a Georgian business dynasty, and half by a local holding company called Riverside Invest. Biograpi confirmed in an email exchange with PunchUp and The Newsground that Gamgoneishvili ultimately controls Riverside. It insisted that it is “neither a shareholder nor a participant” in the Trump Tower deal, and that neither Biograpi nor Gamgoneishvili have interests in the project “in any capacity whatsoever.”

Two days after the Trumps put out their press release naming Biograpi as one of their partners on the development, and saying it was “backed… by Riverside,” the company’s own Instagram account told followers the tower would be built “with our joint efforts.” The firm now says that the release is not legally binding, and that it shared the Trump Organization’s announcement for marketing purposes.

Biograpi states that its co-owners, the Pkhakadze family, are building the tower through a separate Georgian firm called Idea LLC. Corporate registry documents confirm that Biograpi itself owns no part of that company, but also that Gamgoneishvili’s local firm, Riverside, is listed as one of Idea’s creditors as of January. The records do not say how much money is involved.

The entity that controls Riverside, Tall Trade Ltd., is registered in the British Virgin Islands, where financial secrecy laws mean its true owners appear on no public register. Georgian outlet Studio Monitori first traced these firms to Gamgoneishvili in June, while his partner Isaev’s name has surfaced in litigation as one of the men allegedly behind the group.

Those proceedings concern a legal dispute in the British Virgin Islands over SoftSwiss, the software platform used by hundreds of online casinos worldwide, whose parent company fell under Tall Trade’s control in 2022 after a $19 million loan went bad. By its own count, more than 1,500 brands run on SoftSwiss software, spanning casino platforms, game aggregation, sports betting, and crypto payments.

Its operations have drawn fire from gambling regulators. In 2020, Australia’s comms watchdog found one of its arms had illegally marketed casino sites to Australians. In 2023, Dutch authorities fined a Maltese operator of SoftSwiss-powered casinos a record $13.4 million for taking bets without a license. Every share in its parent company, including Tall Trade’s, was sold to an anonymous shell company in Cyprus in November 2022 for $71.4 million. It is not clear who now owns them.

The Georgia deal has been under a cloud since it was announced. The Daily Beast revealed in May that one of the Trumps’ local partners, Archi Group, has links to billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, 70, the country’s ruling oligarch who has been sanctioned by the U.S. since 2024 for his ties to the Putin regime. The Newsground exposed in June that the owners of two other partners on the tower, Finvest Georgia and the Blox Group, have donated tens of thousands of dollars to Ivanishvili’s increasingly authoritarian, pro-Russian party.

PunchUp and The Newsground contacted the White House for comment on this story. “This has nothing to do with the president, whose investment holdings are held in fully discretionary accounts managed by independent third-party financial institutions,” spokeswoman Anna Kelly said.

The Trump Organization, the Sapir Organization, Riverside, Gamgoneishvili, Isaev, and SoftSwiss did not respond in time for publication. Eric Trump, unveiling the tower, has said his family is “especially pleased to collaborate with such respected and professional developers on this project.”

Tom Latchem exposes the secrets, scandals, and stories that powerful people and institutions want to keep under wraps. Follow all of his reporting at PunchUp on Substack.