- Tuesday, April 23, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
Former US president Donald Trump failed to disclose gifts worth $250,000 (£204,295) given to the first family by foreign leaders that included $47,000 (£38,407) worth of gifts by Indian leaders, including prime minister Narendra Modi, former president Ram Nath Kovind and Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Aditya Nath, a partisan democratic Congressional committee has alleged in a report.
The report is titled ‘Saudi Swords, Indian Jewelry, and a Larger-than-Life Salvadoran Portrait of Donald Trump: The Trump administration’s Failure to Disclose Major Foreign Gifts’.
The report presents preliminary findings from Committee Democrats’ ongoing investigation into Trump’s failure to disclose gifts from foreign government officials while in office, as required by the Foreign Gifts and Decorations Act.
Trump, a Republican, served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021.
“Committee Democrats are committed to determining the final whereabouts of these missing big-ticket gifts — such as golf clubs, the larger-than-life custom portrait of Donald Trump from El Salvador, and other potential unreported items — and whether they may have been used to influence the president in his conduct of US foreign policy,” said Congressman Jamie Raskin, ranking member of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability.
The report alleges that Trump, 76, and the first family failed to report more than 100 foreign gifts with a total value of over a quarter of a million dollars.
In November 2021, the US state department’s office of the inspector general issued a report on significant problems at the office of the chief of protocol during the Trump administration, including “missing items of a significant value.”
The report determined that a “lack of accurate recordkeeping and appropriate physical security controls contributed to the loss of the gifts.”
According to the report, the documents revealed that the Trump family received 17 unreported gifts from India with a total estimated value of more than $47,000. Among these gifts was a $8,500 (£6,946) vase by Adityanath, a $4,600 (£3,759) model of the Taj Mahal, a $6,600 (£5,393) Indian rug by Kovind and $1,900 (£1,553) cufflinks by Modi.
(With PTI inputs)
