A company with ties to sanctioned Russian banks and illegal online gambling is co-developing Trump Tower Tbilisi. The Trump Organization named the company as a partner. The company now says it has nothing to do with the project.

"Biograpi Living is not just building projects. We are shaping the future of urban living in Georgia. With landmark developments such as Trump Tower Tbilisi, developed in partnership with the Trump Organization."

— Biograpi Living's CEO, quoted in the Trump Organization's official press release

The Trump Organization announced a 70-story skyscraper in Tbilisi, Georgia, in April 2026. Eric Trump posted an AI rendering on X, declaring it "our first project in the region" and saying the family was "especially pleased to collaborate with such respected and professional developers." Among the developers they named: Biograpi Living, a Georgian real estate firm with an Instagram account full of luxury renderings and aspirational captions.

A joint investigation by The Daily Beast, its sister publication PunchUp, and The Newsground published on August 7 tells a different story. Biograpi Living is half-owned by Paata Gamgoneishvili, a 70-year-old Georgian-Russian oligarch who made his fortune in Moscow through shopping malls, offshore companies, and a betting software platform that regulators in three countries have fined for illegal gambling. The other half belongs to the Pkhakadze family, a Georgian business dynasty. Gamgoneishvili's share is held through a British Virgin Islands shell company whose owners appear on no public register.

Translation: the Trumps named a partner whose controlling interest belongs to a man whose money trail runs through sanctioned Russian banks, a Bulgarian power grid takeover scheme, and an online casino empire.

Gamgoneishvili's career began with a political favor. In 1993, when Boris Yeltsin settled his power struggle with parliament by shelling the White House in central Moscow, Gamgoneishvili threw his weight behind the president through the Union of Afghanistan Veterans, a politically connected network of former servicemen. He was awarded the Order For Personal Courage by Forbes Russia. By his own account, he never served in Afghanistan. The veterans' union, in turn, received duty-free import privileges from Yeltsin that helped turn parts of it into what Russian sources describe as an organized crime cash machine.

Gamgoneishvili registered a trading firm called Gepard under the union's wing, rode the wave into banking, then moved into commercial real estate. He built the upscale Vremena Goda mall on Kutuzovsky Prospekt and the Golden Babylon chain, two of which sold for around 185 million euros to an Austrian fund in 2006. He and his business partner Roland Isaev became residents of Rublyovka, the gated forest enclave that is home to Vladimir Putin's official residence.

Both men later obtained Bulgarian passports, an EU document that has helped them move money and sidestep Western constraints.

The connection to Trump Tower Tbilisi runs through an entity called Riverside Invest, a local holding company that owns 50 percent of Biograpi Living. Corporate records list Tamar Gamgoneishvili, Paata's niece, as a director. Riverside is itself wholly owned by Tall Trade Ltd., registered in the British Virgin Islands, where financial secrecy laws keep beneficial owners off public registers.

British Virgin Islands court records from a bitter legal dispute over SoftSwiss, the software platform that powers more than 1,500 online casino brands worldwide, revealed that Isaev was "a representative and beneficial owner" of Tall Trade. The same Tall Trade that controls half of Biograpi Living once lent roughly 17 million euros to purchase a majority stake in the parent company of SoftSwiss, after the loan went bad and the stake ended up in Tall Trade's hands. In November 2022, every share in the SoftSwiss parent company was sold to an anonymous Cypriot shell for 71.4 million dollars. The current beneficial owners are unknown.

SoftSwiss's operations have drawn regulatory fire across multiple jurisdictions. Australia's communications watchdog found one of its operating companies had illegally marketed casino sites to Australians. Dutch authorities fined a SoftSwiss-powered Maltese operator a record 13.4 million euros in 2023 for taking bets without a license. German investigators found the network's casinos reached German players it was never authorized to serve.

The Trump Organization's press release for Trump Tower Tbilisi quoted Biograpi Living's CEO as a project partner. Two days after the announcement, Biograpi Living's Instagram told followers the tower would be built "with our joint efforts."

Now the company says it is "neither a shareholder nor a participant" in the deal. When pressed on the contradiction, Biograpi stated that "a press release is not a legally binding document" and that it shared the Trump Organization's announcement for marketing purposes. All actual business, it claims, is being conducted through a separate Georgian company called Central Park Icon LLC.

Corporate registry documents confirm that Biograpi Living itself owns no part of Central Park Icon. They also confirm that Gamgoneishvili's Riverside Invest is listed as one of Central Park Icon's creditors as of January 2026. The records do not say how much money is involved.

The White House responded to questions about the story through spokeswoman Anna Kelly: "This has nothing to do with the president, whose investment holdings are held in fully discretionary accounts managed by independent third-party financial institutions."

This is not the first time Trump Tower Tbilisi has raised alarms. The Daily Beast previously revealed that one of the project's partners, Archi Group, has links to Bidzina Ivanishvili, the 70-year-old billionaire and founder of Georgia's ruling party who has been sanctioned by the United States since 2024 for his ties to the Putin regime. The Newsground exposed that two other partners, Finvest Georgia and the Blox Group, have donated tens of thousands of dollars to Ivanishvili's increasingly authoritarian, pro-Russian political party.

Now the investigative net has closed around a third partner, and the money trail leads back to Russian banks that the West blacklisted three years ago. Leaked Russian banking records show Gamgoneishvili was still earning interest on an estimated 375,000 dollars in a Sberbank account as recently as February 2025. A separate set of records shows Isaev collecting interest on an estimated 250,000 dollars at Alfa Bank, another sanctioned lender.

Bulgarian investigative outlet Bivol tied both men to a scheme that allegedly siphoned tens of millions of dollars from Lukoil Bulgaria. The year before that report, a TV journalist who had hosted Bivol's reporters for a segment about the wider scandal was found murdered. Authorities said the killing was unrelated to her journalism. Bivol's editor publicly disputed that conclusion.

The Trump Organization, the Sapir Organization, Riverside Invest, Gamgoneishvili, Isaev, and SoftSwiss did not respond in time for the Daily Beast's publication. Eric Trump's family continues to promote Trump Tower Tbilisi as a landmark achievement in international real estate, a "global importance" project that marks the brand's arrival in the Caucasus.

The question is not whether the Trumps knew who they were partnering with. The press release they issued named the company and quoted its CEO. The question is why a brand that trades on prestige would repeatedly align itself with developers whose money comes from sanctioned banks, gambling fines, and the political machine of a sanctioned Russian ally.

The answer is probably the same one that has applied to every Trump development since the Moscow tower that nearly happened: the name is the product, and the product does not ask questions about who is buying it.