Jared Kushner divests stake in Cadre

Jared Kushner has divested his stake in Cadre, in a bid to end unrelenting scrutiny of his potential conflicts of interest with real estate investment startup.

Kushner, the son-in-law and a senior advisor to President Donald Trump, sold his shares to a trust which then sold them back to the company, Bloomberg reported. His stake was most recently valued at between $25 million and $50 million, according to recent federal disclosures.

The outlet previously reported that a potential investment from SoftBank Group was abandoned after Kushner previously refused to divest his stake in the company. Kushner’s brother, Josh, who runs venture capital firm Thrive Capital, still has a stake in the company through the firm.

The Kushner brothers and Goldman Sachs alum Ryan Williams co-founded Cadre as a platform for “democratizing” real investment in 2014. But since Jared entered the White House in 2016, his ties to federal policy caused headaches for the company, even after he stood down from the board.

Kushner’s involvement in crafting the Opportunity Zones program, a federal tax incentive program that encourages development in low-income areas, became scrutinized when Cadre later acquired properties that stood to benefit from the program.

His investment in the firm also was clouded when a report last year highlighted that Cadre had received $90 million in funding from an unidentified foreign investor.

The firm has since been making changes. Cadre told The Real Deal last month that it planned to scale back investing in Opportunity Zones. It also installed a new president, Allen Smith, who was previously the former CEO of Four Seasons hotels. [Bloomberg] — David Jeans