Trump Tower Deal in Australia Falls Apart And a Blame Game Begins

Like many business executives, David Young, an Australian property developer, touted his latest venture on LinkedIn.

Mr. Young, who is the chief executive of Altus Property Group, wrote in February that he would oversee the construction of Australia’s tallest building on the Gold Coast, a city in Queensland known for Instagram influencers and sunburned backpackers.

But it was the other name on the agreement that drew global attention: the Trump Organization.

The Trump International Hotel & Tower would be the first Trump-branded project in Australia, the latest in a string of international real estate ventures linked to the business empire founded by President Trump.

The Trump family business — now run day-to-day by the president’s sons Eric and Donald Jr. — has focused on international branding deals in recent years. In most of these agreements, the Trump family lends its name to a project and is paid a multimillion-dollar fee, along with a cut of the money the developers make on associated sales.

The Gold Coast project, worth a proposed 1.5 billion Australian dollars (about $1.09 billion), was set to be a 91-story property in Surfers Paradise, a beachside district of the Gold Coast. It was supposed to feature a luxury hotel, residential apartments, a beach club, and retail and commercial spaces. Work was set to begin in August.

But less than three months after the deal was announced, it has fallen apart.

“While we were very excited about the opportunity to bring a world-class development to the Gold Coast, the project was dependent on our licensing partner meeting certain obligations,” a Trump Organization spokesperson said on Tuesday.

“Unfortunately, those obligations” —which referred to financial commitments — “were not fulfilled,” the spokesperson said.

The original news release announcing the deal has been removed from the Trump Organization website.

The project was unveiled to much fanfare in February, with Mr. Young promising it would give the area a “much-needed face-lift.” He said he had first wanted to build a luxury property in Queensland in 2007, and, being a “confident and direct person,” cold-called Ivanka Trump, Mr. Trump’s daughter.

“Given that they are a family business, I sensed that they would assess me very quickly and either dismiss me or start talking,” he wrote in the LinkedIn post from February, which has since been deleted.

“This was years before Donald Trump became President. My project has nothing to do with politics,” he added.

Mr. Young included a photo of him shaking hands with Eric Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Valentine’s Day after signing the deal this year.

Not everyone was enthusiastic about the idea of a Trump tower on the Gold Coast. Thousands rushed to sign online petitions seeking to halt the project over concerns about the “Trump brand and what it represents,” in the words of one petition. The president’s popularity in Australia has plunged to its lowest level of his second term because of the war in Iran, a poll from the Sydney Morning Herald found last month.

Mr. Young, who had been fairly unknown before the Trump deal, said on LinkedIn that he had more than 30 years in the industry, mostly developing commercial properties and residential communities.

After local media reported that he had two bankruptcy filingsMr. Young posted on social media to explain the history behind them and respond to questions about his experience constructing buildings. He wrote on LinkedIn that such queries were “not really relevant.”

“The relevant question is, Do I have a team that is able to successfully do the job, is ready and is able. The answer is yes,” he wrote, adding that suggestions the tower would not be built were “depressingly and unnecessarily negative.”

But on Tuesday, Mr. Young’s tune had changed. Announcing that the deal was off, but insisting the tower would still be built, he wrote on LinkedIn that the Trump brand had become “toxic” in Australia.

“Let’s just say that with the Iran war and everything else, the Trump brand was increasingly unpopular in Australia,” he said in a statement later.

Mr. Young denied that the deal fell apart because of unmet obligations. In the LinkedIn post, he added there was no “acrimony” between the Trump family and himself.

However, a Trump Organization spokesperson said on Tuesday that Mr. Young’s “attempt to blame certain world events for our termination of the agreement is merely a ploy to distract from his own defaults and failures.”

Speaking on Wednesday, the mayor of the Gold Coast council, Tom Tate, said a development application for the tower had never been lodged. He told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that the failed deal was not about relationships, but profit margins.

Craig Hill, who was involved in a petition opposing the project, said he had concerns about what the property could mean for local businesses and house prices.

Mr. Hill said he would likely have several beers to celebrate the end of the deal and prepare his lottery numbers for tomorrow night.

“If I got this win, you never know about the Powerball,” he said.