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Luxury hotels bearing Donald Trump's name grace some of the world's ritziest locations, including New York, Waikiki, and Rio. There is one outlier: the Trump Hotel and Tower in Baku. Trump's partner in the venture is Anar Mammadov, a 34-year-old billionaire playboy whose father serves as Azerbaijan's transportation minister, Russ Choma writes for the nonprofit news website Mother Jones.

The author points that Mammadov's wealth has resulted in part from his father's political connections. Meanwhile, Mammadov has mounted a campaign to rehabilitate Azerbaijan's kleptocratic image in the West by courting some of Washington's most powerful politicians.

“Fueled by billions of dollars reaped from the country's oil and gas fields, Baku has transformed over the last decade into a city of flamboyant excess and garish architecture. The latest addition to the glittering skyline is the Trump Tower, a 33-floor luxury hotel in the shape of a sail,” the author writes. He notes that the hotel’s opening moved from June to the end of the year.

Bearing Trump’s name, the hotel in Baku was constructed and is owned by a company called Garant, which is controlled by Anar Mammadov. But Trump received at least $2.5 million for lending his name and expertise to the project.

Mammadov's father, Zia Mammadov, is widely considered a powerful and influential official in president Ilham Aliyev's government and is rumored “to be worth” more than $1 billion.

Referring to the article of the Foreign Policy titled "The Corleones of the Caspian," the author writes that Mammadov's other companies have received over $1 billion in highway construction contracts, and the firm owns many of Baku's buses and taxis. Mammadov also owned a majority stake in the bank that processed all of the taxi cab fares and the company that provided insurance to all the cabs.

Mammadov heads the Azerbaijan American Alliance, which is one of the three main conduits by which the country sought to lobby the US government in order to burnish its image in the West. A South Caucasus expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Tom de Waal said there is a phenomenon of the children of oligarchs acting as lobbyists abroad. In 2014, the alliance spent more than $2.8 million lobbying Congress and State Department to improve US-Azerbaijan relations. Over the first half of 2015, the group has spent at least $500,000 trying to influence US lawmakers and officials. Mammadov's Facebook page is full of photos of the businessman posing with other politicians, including House Speaker John Boehner.

Choma also highlights that like Trump, Mammadov is a colorful figure. Educated in London, he serves as the head of his country's golf federation. Mammadov's personal life has been a heavily covered topic in Azerbaijani opposition newspapers, which in 2010 published reports that Mammadov had been expelled from Dubai following a raucous dinner party with friends. Azerbaijani media outlets also reported that Mammadov had paid a local restaurant more than $1 million to slaughter a bear kept there and serve kebabs from the meat.

In 2010, international press monitoring organization Reporters Without Borders reported that journalists for Azerbaijani papers Yeni Musavat and Milli Yol were attacked and beaten while trying to take photos of luxury villas owned by members of the Mammadov clan.

The American billionaire Donald Trump, who made a statement in June about his intention to run for the US president, has taken a commanding lead over the Republican candidates. On July 30, BBC reported that a five-day online poll carried out by Reuters and Ipsos found that Trump gets the support of 25 percent of the voters, which gave him a double-digit advantage over nearest his rival Jeb Bush. The former Florida governor and brother of the ex-president George Bush got only 12 per cent. Meanwhile, in June, when Trump announced his participation in the presidential race, only 2 per cent of the voters were ready to vote for him. “Political analysts predict that Republican voters will sooner or later get disappointed in Trump, and then he can run as an independent candidate," BBC says.

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