At the time the investment was made, a coalition of countries led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had established a diplomatic and economic blockade against Qatar, accusing it of supporting terrorist groups across the Middle East. Qatar had counted on its relationship with the United States for protection, but President Donald Trump initially sided with its regional rivals, praising their move in 2017 and criticizing Qatar for funding terrorism.
In 2019 and 2020, Sheikh Sultan bin Jassim Al Thani, a former Qatari government official and the owner of a London-based investment fund, Heritage Advisors, invested in Newsmax. The investment has not been previously reported.
Newsmax had been looking for outside investors to better compete with its much larger rival, Fox News, according to people who spoke at the time with its founder and CEO, Christopher Ruddy. Before and after the investment, senior newsroom leaders urged Newsmax staff to soften coverage of Qatar, current and former employees said. A representative for Newsmax strongly disputed that the network “slanted coverage to be favorable to Qatar,” and that Ruddy had told staff not to criticize the country.
Newsmax and Heritage Advisors confirmed the investment after being presented with documents detailing the transaction, which show that Sultan subsequently transferred his stake to a Cayman Islands-based corporate structure. The $50 million investment represents a significant minority stake in Newsmax, a privately held media company estimated to be worth between $100 million and $200 million, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.
The documents came from a trove of roughly 100,000 leaked files from Genesis Trust, a Cayman Islands-based financial services provider, which were obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and reviewed by The Washington Post.
Schillings, a London-based law firm and representative for Heritage, said that Sultan bought the stake because he “saw potential for the investment to be profitable” and had not acted on behalf of the Qatari state.
Among the documents were internal forms prepared by Genesis that proposed the corporate structure would be “set up with the intention of benefiting the State of Qatar.” They depicted Sheikh Mohammed bin Hamad Al Thani, the younger brother of the ruler of Qatar and vice chairman of the country’s sovereign wealth fund (QIA), as the “option beneficiary,” a term for a person who would take control of the structure under certain circumstances. The documents also state the structure’s funds “will be used as directed by Sheikh Mohammed (on behalf of the Emir), most likely for the Qatar state pension fund.”
Sultan and Mohammed are both members of Qatar’s ruling Al Thani family, which numbers in the thousands.
Schillings said that the forms were erroneous and that neither Sultan nor anyone from Heritage had seen those documents before The Post and ICIJ reached out for comment. It said that the structure never had an option beneficiary and was not set up with the intention of benefiting Qatar. A spokesperson for the financial services firm Highvern, which acquired Genesis Trust in 2022, said that Sultan has always been the sole owner and beneficiary of the Caymans corporate structure.
Highvern director Roger Priaulx wrote in an affidavit in response to questions from The Post and ICIJ that the error on the forms was made without Sultan’s knowledge and resulted from preliminary estate planning discussions during which Mohammed was considered as the option beneficiary, who could make decisions regarding Heritage’s investments in the event of Sultan’s incapacity or death. The documents summarized these ideas but the plans were never put in place, the affidavit states.
“We operate independently of any government and make investment decisions based exclusively on our goal of creating value,” said a Heritage representative. “Where we invest in media, we have no editorial or management control. Any suggestion that our investments are driven by ulterior motives is simply false.”
Though it was not mentioned by name, Heritage was described in the January federal indictment of Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) as having “ties to the Government of Qatar.” The indictment alleges that a Qatari government official associated with the investment firm provided Menendez’s family members with tickets to the Formula One race in Miami. The Post has previously reported that the unnamed firm in the indictment matches the description of Heritage. The firm is not accused of wrongdoing. Schillings did not answer a question about the indictment’s characterization of the firm.
Newsmax had been in conversations in 2017 and 2018 with QIA, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, about buying into the company, according to people familiar with the matter. A Politico report at the time said that Mohammed was the Qatari official overseeing those talks and noted that Ruddy denied that Qatar was going to invest in his company.
Newsmax representatives confirmed that the outlet approached Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund about a potential investment “around 2017,” and the fund ultimately passed.
Representatives for Heritage Advisors and Newsmax stated that Sultan’s 2019 investment was a separate transaction from the earlier talks with the Qatari government.
Other investments by Heritage Advisors in recent years include a Miami-based real estate developer, a professional soccer team in Indiana, and The News Movement, a media entity launched in 2020 to target a Gen Z audience and co-founded by William Lewis, who became publisher of The Post this year.
Ruddy, a longtime media executive with deep ties to Republican politics, has long been a fixture at Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago Club and spent much of Trump’s presidency positioning himself in close proximity to the former president, according to club members and former Trump aides. In the months following Trump’s 2020 defeat, Newsmax amplified Trump’s false claims that the election had been stolen from him.
Newsmax’s coverage denying Trump’s loss helped briefly lift ratings, so much so that for one night in December 2020, Newsmax bested cable news giant Fox News among the key demographic of 25- to 54- year-old viewers during its 7 p.m. hour. “We’re here to stay,” Ruddy said at the time. “The ratings are showing that.” But Newsmax’s viewership, as measured by Nielsen, a media analytics company, plateaued and then quickly shrank.
Before and after Sultan’s investment, the outlet’s top editorial brass urged staff to soften on-air coverage of Qatar, including by avoiding discussion of the nation’s human rights record and treatment of migrant labor ahead of it hosting the World Cup in 2022, according to two Newsmax employees at the time who witnessed the exchanges and spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid angering the Newsmax CEO.
“We were not allowed to criticize Qatar,” one of these people said. “We were told very clearly from the top down, no touching this.” Ruddy verbally reprimanded a female host in 2018 for her on-air comments about Qatar, according to two other people who saw the exchange.
A Newsmax representative, Bill Daddi, said that Newsmax has published “numerous critical items about Qatar” and largely tracks with major wire and news outlet reports. He pointed to several examples on Newsmax.com, including an interview with a former Israeli ambassador who attacked Qatar for having ties with Iran and Hamas. He also provided examples on Newsmax’s TV channel since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, in which the outlet’s hosts and guests frequently condemned Qatar for funding Hamas and allowing the movement’s leaders to reside in the country, among other things.
Ruddy “categorically denies he told any host to not criticize Qatar,” Daddi added. “While he is involved in coverage from a general perspective, Mr. Ruddy never tells hosts or correspondents what to say on air.”
In early 2018, a lawyer working on behalf of Newsmax to raise money, Christopher Nixon Cox, described a potential Qatari investment as a way to improve the emirate’s standing in Washington. Joey Allaham, a businessman and lobbyist working on the investment for Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund and Mohammed, shared with ICIJ and The Post WhatsApp messages between himself and Cox, and said that he introduced Ruddy and the Qatari officials but was eventually frozen out. Allaham said he was not informed of the subsequent deal involving Sultan.
Cox wrote an opinion article for Newsmax — the publication of which was approved by Ruddy, Cox told Allaham — praising Qatar’s cooperation with the United States in fighting terrorism. That article “will help me make the case” to the Qataris, Allaham wrote Cox.
“Newsmax deal is incredible for Qs,” Cox wrote to Allaham roughly two weeks after the article appeared online. “Literally is a game changer.”
When asked about his WhatsApp messages, Cox did not directly address them but he told The Post that he had approached the Qatari sovereign wealth fund “approximately six years ago” about an investment in Newsmax, and that “they decided not to invest.” He added that “Newsmax has proven itself a great company and investment and worthy of any major fund’s investment.”
Allaham also showed The Post and ICIJ his WhatsApp messages with Ruddy. The two met at a steakhouse in Florida, where Allaham says they discussed a potential Qatari investment.
“That was the deal Chris [Ruddy] wanted to make: By not criticizing, we’ll be positive,” Allaham said. “That was the whole plan.”
For much of Trump’s time in office, Ruddy was a rare on-the-record source for journalists about the president’s views. In doing so, he became a recognizable Trump “insider” even though some people close to the former president, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private conversations, said that Ruddy’s influence with Trump was always more of an illusion cultivated by the Newsmax CEO than a reality.
Nevertheless, Ruddy’s relationship with Trump was a major selling point as his representatives attempted to secure a large investment from Qatar. A short biography of Ruddy sent by Cox to Allaham in advance of a dinner with the Qatari defense minister in January 2018 describes Ruddy as “one of President Trump’s best friends and the President’s most trusted private advisor,” and goes on to say that Ruddy “maintain[s] walk in privileges at the Oval Office and he privately dines with the President several times a month.”
Former Trump aides say that the characterization of Ruddy as Trump’s “most trusted private advisor” is false, and that while the two men see each other frequently at Mar-a-Lago, Trump is well-known for having highly transactional relationships outside his immediate family rather than close friendships.
The Washington charm offensive
For Qatar, then isolated by the Saudi-UAE blockade, gaining access to those close to Trump represented a key priority. “The Qataris were saying, ‘Of course we have to work on both sides of the aisle, but we have to particularly win over the conservatives and the far right, because these are the guys who are calling the shots,’” said Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer at King’s College London who studies Qatari security policy.
Qatar launched an expensive and wide-ranging effort to convince the Trump administration of its value as a regional partner. It paid for a $1.8 billion expansion of Al Udeid Air Base, the largest U.S. military facility in the Middle East, and signed a $12 billion deal with U.S. defense contractor Boeing to buy F-15 fighter jets. Qatar’s emir visited Washington in April 2018 and July 2019, where he met with Trump and signed billions of dollars in business deals.
“They are investing very heavily in our country,” Trump said of Qatar during the 2019 White House meeting. “They’re creating lots of jobs.”
Qatar routinely touts its tens of billions of dollars in investments in American businesses, which serve to both diversify its economy and bolster its stature and influence in the U.S. capital. Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, for example, has made major investments in U.S. real estate and bought a 5 percent stake last year in the company that owns Washington’s professional basketball and ice hockey teams.
According to a report released on Jan. 4 by House Democrats, the Qatari government paid over $460,000 during Trump’s presidency to Trump World Tower in New York City for properties it owned, and in 2018 members of Qatar’s ruling family spent more than $280,000 at Washington, D.C.’s Trump International Hotel. In August 2018, a firm that had received significant financial backing from Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund also bailed out a company controlled by the family of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and close adviser, on a troubled Manhattan real estate investment.
Trump’s company has said it did not market properties to foreign governments during Trump’s time in the White House and that it donated profits from foreign leaders to the Treasury Department. The company that took over Kushner’s building, Brookfield Asset Management, has said that Qatar had no involvement in that transaction.
Even after Trump had backed away from his earlier criticisms, Qatar remained anxious about its standing within the administration, according to former U.S. officials and those close to the emirate.
“They were under enormous pressure,” said David Schenker, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs during the Trump administration. Schenker pointed to mobile truck billboards commissioned by Qatar in Washington and New York as part of its influence campaign. “I think that highlights some of their insecurity.”
A person familiar with Qatar’s strategy at the time said that it wanted to cultivate a sympathetic conservative outlet in the United States and considered Fox News too close to Saudi Arabia, as a Saudi prince previously held a 6 percent stake in the outlet’s parent company. This person said they were told by a Qatari official that the emirate “wanted to push every lever they had to establish better relations in Washington.”
Qatar is also the primary funder of Al Jazeera, one of the most influential media networks in the Arab world. In February 2021, following Sultan’s investment in Newsmax, Al Jazeera launched a right-leaning outlet called “Rightly,” which was meant to attract American conservative viewers. The outlet ended operations in December 2021.
Sultan’s investment in Newsmax was not listed on Heritage Advisors’ website. A representative for Heritage said that the firm’s website only lists roughly one-third of its investments.
Heritage Advisors’ investments include the News Movement, a digital media platform aimed at Gen Z audiences that Lewis co-founded. The firm’s website listed its investment in the News Movement as recently as January, but it was subsequently removed from the site. A spokesperson for the News Movement said it is a “founder-owned business” and that the “several outside minority investors that have provided additional funding” since its launch in 2020 “are passive with no operational or editorial involvement.”
In a statement, Kathy Baird, a spokesperson for The Post, said, “When William Lewis joined The Washington Post, he stepped down from his role as CEO and Publisher of The News Movement and has no operational involvement. He remains a proud shareholder.” Neither the News Movement nor Baird responded to other questions about the Heritage investment.
Sultan reaped economic benefits from holding the investment in the Cayman Islands, one of the world’s most prominent offshore havens. The Caribbean nation does not impose taxes on corporations — a key reason that more than 100,000 companies have established operations there. The country also has extensive corporate secrecy laws, and does not publish information on the ownership of corporate entities.
“If you have a network of companies that pass through the Caymans, it is a bit like drawing a veil over the ownership,” said Graham Barrow, a former banker who has worked as a consultant for several NGOs to advocate for policies that combat money laundering.
The leaked documents show that Heritage Advisors employees began preparations to transfer the Newsmax stake into the Cayman Islands corporate structure on Nov. 10, 2020, one week after Trump’s election loss.
Representatives for Heritage Advisors said there was no attempt to conceal the investment. They said the transfer was done for convenience following the establishment of the London-based firm, and was a common practice for entities investing in the United States.
The Saudi-UAE blockade of Qatar fizzled out just as Trump was leaving the White House — and while Sultan was in the process of putting his stake in Newsmax in the Cayman Islands.
Three years since he left office, Trump has continued to praise Newsmax. “You’re really going up like a rocket ship,” he said during an interview on the channel in May. “And that’s a fantastic thing for a conservative movement.”
David Kenner is a reporter with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Josh Dawsey contributed to this report. The Post and ICIJ collaborated on this report.
But this arrangement has long been riddled with conflicts of interest and opportunities for collusion — which is one reason that Americans have been paying some of the highest real estate commissions in the world, typically about 6 percent split between the buyer’s and seller’s agents. Eventually, this invited lawsuits, and last year a Missouri jury thwacked NAR with a $1.8 billion verdict. Last week, apparently fearing more and worse to come, NAR announced a $418 million settlement that theoretically could radically change the way this market operates — by making it easier for sellers to negotiate fees and forcing buyers’ agents to work for their own clients, rather than for the sellers.
I say “theoretically” because, although for decades regulators and courts have been cracking down on too-cozy arrangements between real estate agents, the agents, with the enterprising spirit for which American business is so justly famed, kept finding new ways to maintain high fees. This could happen again. Yet the changes are substantial enough that it seems possible that this settlement will fundamentally alter how things are done. In which case Americans will have to ask themselves something they should have asked decades ago: How much is a real estate agent worth to you?
The answer, I’m confident, will be less than 6 percent.
Arguably, the value of brokerage services has been dropping since NAR was founded in 1908. Just imagine how hard it would have been to buy or sell a house without an agent when buyers and sellers had no easy way to know which properties were available, which neighborhoods might be appealing, how much houses usually sold for or whether a place you saw advertised was something you’d actually be interested in.
Since then, the MLS has made the market more transparent and efficient, and agents deserve credit for creating it. But the advent of automobiles made it easier for buyers to zip from open house to open house, and photographs enable them to rule out properties before visiting them — without needing an agent to help narrow their choices. And now the internet has changed the game entirely. Today, home buyers go online to see detailed photos, virtual tours and every home’s past sales history. The internet also instantly delivers other data that brokers might once have offered: neighborhood crime rates, schools, problem residents, coming local developments, what nearby houses have sold for.
This is not to say buyers’ agents are useless — they can let buyers into houses, help them fill out paperwork, make sure the termite inspection happens and hold people’s hands through the biggest transactions of their lives. But if I imagine how much I’d personally be willing to pay for these services, it’s somewhere between $500 and $2,000. Today, an agent who finds a buyer a $500,000 home typically collects many times that amount.
Sellers’ agents potentially add much more value than that through expert staging, price setting, marketing and negotiation. But that potential is not always realized.
Many sellers find their brokers by getting recommendations from friends, which probably selects for amiability, rather than skill. Research suggests that brokers often underprice homes, either by mistake or because it’s in their interest to sell houses quickly and move on to the next deal instead of waiting for top dollar. When real estate agents sell their own homes, they take a few more days to sell, but for 3.7 percent more, a 2005 study from economists Steven D. Levitt and Chad Syverson found. According to a study from 2012, which looked at a market where the listing service was unbundled from other services such as marketing and negotiation, and many sellers didn’t use agents, adding a broker to the transaction reduced the selling price by 5.9 to 7.7 percent, suggesting that without the value of MLS access, those brokers were worse than useless.
These studies are a bit dated, and of course there’s a lot of variance in agent performance; the best might add value for their clients, and the worst might subtract it. If this settlement shakes the lower-performing agents out of the market, this could be good for customers and the better realtors — and maybe even justify some sizeable fees.
Still, it’s hard to believe that brokers have on average grown vastly more useful or skilled since then. Rather, the internet keeps giving sellers more data and better tools to perform the functions that brokers once did. So it’s probably still true that the greatest value most agents offer is access to the MLS and the buyers who come through it. And it is also undoubtedly true that this service could be provided for considerably less than 6 percent of the sale price of your home.
The National Association of Realtors last week committed to abandoning a century-old tradition: requiring sellers’ agents to split a service fee, expressed as a percentage of the sales price, with buyers’ agents. Though in theory the rate is negotiable, in practice it has been anything but because of rules the NAR enforces through conditions it places on access to the databases on which nearly all properties for sale are listed. This has led Realtors to agree on a standard commission — that 6 percent or so. This practice limited competition among agents on price and service quality.
The numbers speak for themselves. While commissions in other industries rise and fall with economic tides and technological innovations (think stock transaction costs, sinking from 1.2 percent to below 0.2 percent between the 1970s and 2000), the real estate commission has not. Homeowners selling $400,000 homes, around the national median, spend $24,000 or so in commissions — $12,000 to their agents and $12,000 to buyers’ agents. Add up all sellers across the country, and sellers are paying around $100 billion yearly in commissions, according to a 2019 Brookings report. This summer, when the new rules kick in, that might finally change. Relaxing NAR rules pertaining to commissions, as the settlement will do, could decrease total commissions by as much as 30 percent. Sellers might list their homes for less in the first place. Lower transaction costs could also encourage them to sell more often, bringing badly needed supply to the housing market — and driving down prices even further.
With commissions more negotiable, buyers will also likely have more opportunity to choose agents based on their charges. Want boutique services from the best of the best, always tipping you off to the hottest homes on the market and available to tour them on the spot? You’ll have to pay more for that than for bare bones representation when you’ve decided to make an offer. If you don’t know exactly what you want when you start house-hunting, you might be able to pony up for whatever perks an agent can offer as you go — buying “a la carte,” as some in the industry put it.
This shift should have happened long ago. After all, the internet has made it easier than ever for buyers to buy and sellers to sell without much expert intervention. The only reason it took this long, the public and the courts both began to recognize ahead of this month’s settlement, was NAR-sponsored collusion.
The settlement also has broader lessons for the too-tight housing market: Structural changes to how homes are bought and sold can add up to much more than marginal savings. The scrutiny should continue, including from the White House; President Biden vowed in his State of the Union address to examine title insurance, limiting the money home buyers fork over when they take loans to protect against the possibility that they’ve bought their property from someone who doesn’t own it. These policies usually cost about $2,000 for that $400,000 home. But the president has launched a pilot program that would waive the need for title insurance on refinancing for certain federally backed mortgages by finding methods of vetting titles ahead of time. This should serve as an opening for broader action.
In this same spirit, regulators should make it easier to build — as well as buy and sell — removing unnecessary restrictions on construction. Here, too, Mr. Biden has the right idea: The White House announced last year a plan to reduce “restrictive and costly land use and zoning rules.” Zoning is another seemingly arcane feature of the housing market that disadvantages American home buyers. Unlike real-estate-agent fees and title insurance, though, there is less opportunity to fix zoning, permitting and land-use policies through one big, national policy shift. State and local governments have established reams of burdensome building rules. They will have to undo them to allow the housing supply to catch up with demand. This would take time. But it would be the most important response to unnecessarily high housing prices.