Donald Trump Jr (AP)
The Indian government is treating Donald Trump Jr’s trip to India as a “private visit”, sources told The Indian Express Monday. Trump Jr, son of US President Donald Trump and the executive vice-president of Trump Organisation, will be speaking at a business summit later this week in Delhi, which will be addressed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, among other Cabinet ministers. Advertisements of a dinner with Trump Jr, where prospective property buyers at the Trump Towers project in Gurgaon will be invited, have been appearing in the media since last week.
While the US embassy is believed to be keeping an “arm’s length” from Trump Jr’s visit, sources told The Indian Express that local authorities are involved in the “security element” for the President’s son. While no meetings have been scheduled between officials or ministers from the Ministry of External Affairs and Trump Jr, sources did not rule out the possibility of meetings with officials from other ministries or the state governments where Trump properties are coming up.
India is reportedly the Trump Organisation’s biggest international market, with developments in four major cities — Mumbai, Pune, Gurgaon and Kolkata. Over the next five years, twin towers with a height of over 600 feet each are supposed to come up on Gurgaon’s Golf Course Extension road. Part of the Trump Tower project in Delhi-NCR, developers said they will have “around 50 floors” with 250 apartments, each measuring between 3,500-7,500 square feet, and costing between Rs 5 crore-Rs 10 crore.
While no progress has been made on the towers so far, with construction slated to begin only “in March”, officials claimed the project has already clocked Rs 500 crore worth of bookings, selling over two units a day since its launch in mid-January. On the first day of the launch, sales of Rs 150 crore had been recorded, with 20 units being sold, they claimed.
Part of the lure, perhaps, is that the marketing is focused heavily around the Trump name. According to Pankaj Bansal, director of the joint developer, M3M Group, the first 100 buyers of units in Trump Tower, Gurgaon, will be taken to the US and hosted by Trump Jr. “This trip is a celebration of all we have achieved, including the launch of Trump developments in Kolkata and Delhi,” he said recently.
According to officials, a majority of buyers so far are from business families in Delhi-NCR, including top CEOs of MNCs as well as NRIs. Almost all buyers so far claim to have purchased the apartments for “self use”.
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