Trump Jr denies 'profiteering from presidency' as pressure grows on his India business trip

Donald Trump Jr insisted he is not "profiteering from the presidency" as he tours India to drum up sales in luxury Trump Tower developments

Halfway through his weeklong tour to promote real estate deals worth several billion pounds, President Trump’s elder son said no new deals would be done while is father is in office.

He went so far as to suggest the Trump business had been damaged by his father ploughing his time into the White House.

“The company  (Trump Organisation) is not signing new deals with business partners outside the US as long as Trump (Sr) remains in office to avoid potential ethical conflicts” Mr Trump Jr declared in an interview published in The Times Of India on Wednesday.

“We are refraining from doing new deals while my father is in office” he said as a consequence of which his company was turning down lucrative contracts worldwide worth hundreds of millions of dollars.  

Defending criticism of his highly publicised trip, he said that if his father remained in office as president for seven more years there was a possibility, he declared, that several potential deals in the pipeline would no longer "remain on the table" in 2025 further decreasing profits.

Speaking to CNBC-TV 18 news channel late on Tuesday night Mr Trump Jr brusquely dismissed accounts of him profiteering from his fathers position as "nonsense".  

Most people, he said, deliberately ignored the "opportunity cost" of the deals that Trump Organisation had been unable to conclude because his father was the US president.

In an effort at blunting widespread criticism that indeed there was a conflict of interest in peddling the family name for profit, Mr Trump Jr said he would focus on new real estate deals in India only after his father was "over the finishing line" as US President.

“We could do so many more (deals in India), but we are not doing those” he declared, adding that even though his father had put curbs on expanding Trump Organization’s financial interests, the US president had received no credit for doing so.  

But Trump Jr refused to discuss the revenue model for his India-based luxury apartment businesses and their overall worth. 

Since its entry into India’s real estate market in 2014, four Trump Towers luxury blocks of flats with anticipated revenue of over £1.07 billion had been launched in Pune and Mumbai in the west, Kolkata in the east and in New Delhi’s suburb, Gurgaon.

Each of the 254 flats in Gurgaon, which is Trump’s flagship project, are priced between £610,00 and £1.2 million. 

For over a week before Mr Trump Jr’s arrival in India on Monday major local newspapers carried glossy, front-page advertisements declaring: "Trump has arrived. Have You?"

The adverts also promised potential apartment owners in Gurgaon "conversation and dinner" with Mr Trump Jr a day later.  

Media access, however, to Mr Trump Jr’s events is limited and only news organisation approved by his team have been provided access.

Shortly before assuming office President Trump had announced that he would hand over his business empire, which includes high-end hotels and homes across the world, to his two sons Donald and Eric and shift all his assets to a trust.

But many watchdog organisations accused the US president of not going far enough in divorcing himself from his business interests.  

Meanwhile, Trump Jr will be speaking to Indian businessmen at the Global Business Summit in New Delhi on Friday on Indo-Pacific ties. Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, will also be present at this event.

Earlier, Mr Trump Jr’s sister Ivanka Trump was one of the principal speakers at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit last November in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad.