The Real Deal reports that financing for Extell Development’s proposed 50 West 66th Street will be coming from Meridian Capital Limited, a Kazakhstani-owned, Bermuda-based, London and Hong Kong operated funding source. How global! The article continues, with input from specialists in the field:
“Clay Fuller, a foreign policy scholar who studies dictatorships and corruption at the American Enterprise Institute, considers Kazakhstan a kleptocracy. In such states, he said, “the structure of rule is based on exchange of private goods amongst elites. So they bribe each other off.” Kazakh investors have been caught up in money laundering lawsuits implicating major U.S. real estate projects developed by the likes of the Trump Organization and the Chetrit Group.”
The building has still yet to clear Department of Building permits and no formal estimates of cost have been released…this report would account for $200 Million of the financing.