Bloomberg claims Trump bought the right to lease the building for the next 60 years or so. Trump does not own the property at 40 Wall Street. He is paying somet

Bloomberg claims Trump bought the right to lease the building for the next 60 years or so. Trump does not own the property at 40 Wall Street. He is paying something like $1.5 million per year in rent. He bought the rights to lease the building from someone who previously bought those rights for the mostly empty building for $8 million but were having trouble getting tenants. It isn't clear if Trump bought all of the same rights or if they retained some. The people who previously had the rights to lease out the building paid $8 million, but along with that came the responsibility of paying rent to the landowner. If they hadn't been able to make progress in two years, it doesn't seem outlandish that they would be willing to sell for much less than they paid. Their big expense wasn't going to be the cost of the rights to lease the tower, but the actual cost of leasing the tower (or maybe it is better to say the land the tower sits on) over time. Further, they may have retained some rights that they found valuable so I wouldn't assume that what they bought for $8 million was the same thing Trump says he bought for $1 million. So was the deal "shady"? Not from any information presented in this thread nor from anything that is readily available from a quick search. It could be of course, but the actual facts that are available don't appear to support such a claim.