Trump Organization drops out of $250M Black Sea project

President-elect Donald Trump’s company has abandoned its role in a planned $250 million condo tower in a Black Sea resort town.

The Trump Organization will no longer help develop a 47-story residential condominium in Batumi, Georgia, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday.

“[We’ve decided] to formally end the development of Trump Tower, Batumi,” Trump’s company said in a joint email statement with the Silk Road Group, its local partner on the project.

Trump has begun distancing himself from his namesake business empire, which critics say may pose a conflict of interest with his incoming presidency. He has yet to detail his business plans since winning the election. The Trump Organization has recently pulled out of projects in Azerbaijan and Brazil.

{mosads}Bloomberg said Silk Road will forge ahead with the luxury tower in Batumi without Trump Organization involvement.

Trump first announced the project in 2012 alongside then-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who lost both his power and citizenship there the following year.

Silk Road founder Giorgi Ramishvili refused to comment Wednesday on why the Trump Organization would no longer collaborate on the tower and declined to tell Bloomberg if he would attend Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration in Washington, D.C.

Ramishvili initially said in December “the project would go on” after Trump transitioned into the White House.

Bloomberg reported at the time that the Batumi tower had been stalled after Saakashvili’s ouster in 2012.

Former Georgian Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili, whose party defeated Saakashvili’s, was a vocal critic of the project.

“Trump did not invest in Georgia,” he told reporters in 2012. “It was kind of like a trick. They gave him money and they both played along, Saakashvili and Trump.”

“And, as you know, Saakashvili was the master of lies. I don’t know what project this is, I’ve never been seriously interested. We won’t go anything based on such fairy tales.”

Trump had agreed to license his name to the tower in Batumi and considered the resort town the “Monte Carlo of the Caucasus,” Bloomberg said.

Silk Road would have “fully invested” between $250 million and $300 million on the project, Ako Akhalaia, head of its marketing and PR departments, told The Georgian Journal in November.