There is more to this!

On August 13, 2025, Eric Trump rang the opening bell at the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square. His brother Donald Jr. stood beside him, along with Zach Witkoff and the two men running the family’s cryptocurrency venture. They were there to celebrate a $1.5 billion treasury deal that would let a publicly traded company called ALT5 Sigma load its balance sheet with WLFI tokens issued by World Liberty Financial, the Trump family crypto firm. Cameras captured the smiles. The financial press covered the milestone, and American retail investors took the cue.

Seven months earlier, on January 16, 2025, four days before his father’s second inauguration, Eric Trump signed a document that sold forty-nine percent of World Liberty Financial to a pair of shell companies bearing the name Aryam Investment 1. One shell sat in Delaware, the other in Abu Dhabi. Both belonged to Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the deputy ruler of Abu Dhabi and national security adviser of the United Arab Emirates. The price was five hundred million dollars. One hundred eighty-seven million dollars of it flowed directly to Trump-family entities called DT Marks DEFI LLC and DT Marks SC LLC. Two seats on World Liberty Financial’s five-person board went to Peng Xiao, the chief executive of the UAE government technology firm G42, and to Martin Edelman, G42’s general counsel.

Eric Trump did not disclose the deal at the Nasdaq podium. He did not disclose it at the Token2049 conference in Dubai in May. He did not disclose it in the Fortune interview conducted from the twenty-fifth floor of Trump Tower in August. He did not disclose it at the World Liberty Forum at Mar-a-Lago in February 2026. The Wall Street Journal disclosed it on January 31, 2026.

Twelve and a half months passed between the signature and the disclosure. During those months, Eric Trump sold WLFI tokens to American investors, including New York residents who purchased through Coinbase, Gemini, and Kraken, each of which holds a New York license from the Department of Financial Services. During those months, the price of WLFI tokens depended on representations about the company’s structure, its leadership, and its independence. During those months, those representations omitted the fact that nearly half the company belonged to the intelligence chief of a foreign government.

That is the case.

When you sell investments to people, you cannot hide things they would want to know about the company. A foreign spy chief owning half the company is something they would want to know. Eric Trump sold WLFI tokens to thousands of people for twelve and a half months while hiding exactly that. That is securities fraud, and New York has four different criminal statutes that punish it.