while the Imam is issuing threats, Donald Trump is opening up negotiations,
Trump Offers to Buy Out Park51 Investor.
You can read Trump’s letter here (via Andy McCarthy).
The NY Post has more details,
Donald Trump makes bid for proposed mosque building
Trump’s offer is for the amount Egyptian businessman Hisham Elzanaty originally paid for the two-building site and related lease rights last year, plus a 25-percent premium. That would make the offer worth more than $6 million.
The offer also contains one key condition — that any mosque built by the backers elsewhere “would be located at least five blocks further from the World Trade Center site,” the mogul wrote in a letter to a major investor in the mosque site, Egyptian businessman Hisham Elzanaty.
But Trump’s low-ball offer might not quash the mosque brouhaha because Elzanaty yesterday said he was willing to sell the site and related lease rights for “18 or 20 million dollars.”
Elzanaty, who provided the majority of the $4.85 million financing used to acquire the site in 2009, said he has already received offers for three times that amount from other bidders.
Extortion. Pure and simple.
UPDATE
Well, that didn’t take long: NY mosque investor declines Trump’s buyout offer
Donald Trump offered Thursday to buy out a major investor in the real estate partnership that controls the site near ground zero where a Muslim group wants to build a 13-story Islamic center and mosque.
The offer, though, fell flat nearly instantly.
“This is just a cheap attempt to get publicity and get in the limelight,” said Wolodymyr Starosolsky, a lawyer for the investor, Hisham Elzanaty.
And of course Elzanaty would never stoop to such a thing.
