Former President Donald Trump's social media company may have gone public last week, but a new report indicates it might have been possible thanks to a Russian-American businessman under scrutiny in a federal insider-trading investigation.
According to The Guardian, emergency loans provided in part by Anton Postolnikov helped keep Trump Media afloat in 2022 after the Securities and Exchange Commission opened an investigation into the company's planned merger with Digital World Acquisition Corporation.
The report says the investigation "caused the company to burn through cash at an extraordinary rate" and led Trump Media to take emergency loans because it could not secure financing from traditional banks, which were reluctant to lend millions in wake of the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
One of those emergency loans came from an entity called ES Family Trust, which allegedly operated like a shell company for Postolnikov, according to The Guardian, which cited "leaked documents."
Postolnikov co-owns Paxum Bank, a small bank registered on the Caribbean island of Dominica that has a reputation for funding porn projects, per the report. He's also been the subject of a criminal investigation by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security into money laundering and insider-trading.
"Postolnikov appears to have used the trust to loan money to help save Trump Media – and the Truth Social platform – because his bank itself could not furnish the loan," The Guardian reported, noting that Paxum Bank lacks a US banking license and is not regulated by the FDIC.
The report goes on to say ES Family Trust was funded for the first time on December 2, 2021 and three weeks later, Trump Media received a $2 million loan, followed by another $3 million loan in February 2022. Under the agreement, Trump Media converted the loan principal into "shares of company stock," giving the trust a major stake in the company, according to The Guardian.
And the investment paid off, per the report, as "ES Family Trust's stake in Trump Media is worth between $20 million and $40 million." The report also indicates that Postolnikov personally benefitted financially as well.
The Guardian report emphasized that there is "no indication" that Trump and his company knew about the nature of the loans. In response to the report, a lawyer representing Trump Media told the outlet that it was pushing a "false narrative that TMTG has these fake connections to Russia."
"It is a hoax," the statement said. "Litigation will continue on this point and we are confident that The Guardian will ultimately be held responsible for its defamation and this story should be retracted."