UAE Royal’s Alleged Stake in Trump Crypto Venture Raises Ethical Concerns

A UAE-backed entity tied to Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed agreed to buy a 49% stake in Trump-linked crypto firm World Liberty Financial for $500 million four days before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal on Saturday.

A large share of the proceeds flowed to Trump and Witkoff family entities, the report said, with the deal preceding the Trump administration’s approval of expanded UAE access to advanced U.S. AI chips that had been restricted under the Biden administration.

The primary agreement was signed by Eric Trump on behalf of World Liberty Financial, the family’s crypto investment and decentralized finance project.

It involved an investment vehicle linked to Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE’s national security adviser and a member of the UAE royal family.

The deal made the UAE-linked entity the crypto firm’s largest outside shareholder and directed roughly $187 million to Trump family entities and at least $31 million to Witkoff family-affiliated entities, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The White House did not immediately return Decrypt’s request for comment.

It comes as Congress continues to table a broad crypto market structure bill less than a year after the GENIUS Act took effect and began reshaping federal oversight of stablecoins and digital asset markets.

“This is corruption, plain and simple,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, ranking member of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, told Decrypt. “The Trump Administration must reverse its decision to sell sensitive AI chips to the United Arab Emirates.” 

Officials named by Warren, including Steve Witkoff, David Sacks, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, and other Trump Administration officials, “must testify in front of Congress on mounting evidence that they sold out American national security in order to benefit the President’s crypto company,” Senator Warren said.

This should include an inquiry about whether any officials “lined their own pockets in the process,” she noted, adding that Congress “needs to grow a spine and put a stop to Trump’s crypto corruption.”

Senator Warren’s statement follows an earlier call for an investigation in May last year into the extent of Donald Trump and his family’s crypto ventures in the UAE, as well as another request from December on whether Trump Administration officials “used their positions to cash in on foreign crypto deals.”

A ‘disguised gift’?

Other critics have warned that Trump’s personal and family ties to crypto ventures risk blurring the line between policymaking and private financial interest at a moment when the administration is backing crypto regulation and expanding U.S. crypto market access.

Some have also noted how the Trump family’s ventures have been “frustrating” bipartisan negotiations pushing for crypto regulation.

What’s concerning in the financial arrangement is that it appears “like a subscription for policy access,” Andrew Rossow, public affairs attorney and CEO of AR Media Consulting, told Decrypt.

The “four-day window” with which the deal with the UAE was reportedly signed appears as “a massive red flag,” Rossow said, because Congressional committees “typically use proximity to policy shifts as the primary justification for subpoenas.”

“Where a company with no revenue and no product sells 49% of itself for $500 million, there is a very strong presumption that this fails the ‘arms-length transaction’ test, and instead, appears to be a ‘disguised gift,’ which bypasses traditional campaign finance and gift limit laws,” he added.

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) has the power to review foreign investments in U.S. businesses that affect national security, he explained.

Legal principles at play include the Foreign Emoluments Clause, which bars federal officials from accepting benefits from foreign states without congressional approval. However, courts have struggled with whether business transactions at claimed market value qualify as prohibited emoluments, an issue that surfaced repeatedly during Trump’s first term, Rossow explained.

While World Liberty Financial is technically a crypto firm, its links to the president and his family, as well as its use of stablecoins to facilitate deals with the UAE, “may be argued as a ‘covered transaction’ because it creates a financial dependency that compromises the POTUS’s ‘independence’ on UAE-related security policy,” Rossow added.