Kushner’s Fund Has Reaped Millions in Fees, but So Far Returned No Profits

The private equity firm run by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of former President Donald J. Trump, has been paid at least $112 million in fees since 2021 by Saudi Arabia and other foreign investors, even though as of July it had not yet returned any profits to the governments largely bankrolling the firm.

Those are among the findings of a Senate Finance Committee inquiry into the operations of Affinity Partners, the Miami-based firm Mr. Kushner set up.

The committee opened an investigation this spring in response to reporting in The New York Times examining the firm’s first three years of work.

Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, the committee’s chairman, said the new information had only deepened his concerns that Mr. Kushner’s firm creates conflicts of interest, particularly with his father-in-law running for re-election.

Mr. Wyden asked why Affinity Partners had not “distributed a penny of earnings back to clients,” and suggested that perhaps it was set up primarily as a way for foreign entities to pay the Kushners rather than a typical fund in which partners reap the returns of deployed capital.

“Affinity’s investors may not be motivated by commercial considerations but rather the opportunity to funnel foreign government money to members of President Trump’s family, namely Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump,” Mr. Wyden wrote in a letter to Affinity this week, asking two dozen questions.

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“Partisan politics aside, Affinity Partners is an S.E.C.-registered investment firm that has always acted appropriately and any suggestion to the contrary is false,” Chad Mizelle, Affinity Partners’s chief legal officer, said in a statement. “We are fortunate to have the support of some of the world’s most sophisticated investors and work hard on their behalf every day.”

As The Times has previously reported, at least 99 percent of the roughly $3 billion invested came from overseas sources, including $2 billion from the Saudi government’s Public Investment Fund.

Most of the rest of the money comes from the sovereign wealth funds of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, as well as a chunk from Terry Gou, the Taiwanese billionaire and founder of Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer.

But there is a fifth “mystery foreign investor Affinity has declined to identify,” according to the letter the committee sent this week to Mr. Mizelle.

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As of the end of 2023 — halfway through the five-year investment commitment that Saudi Arabia and the other foreign governments made to Mr. Kushner — the firm had invested about $535 million of the $3 billion, with that total rising to about $1.1 billion as of July, according to the committee, citing information provided by Affinity.

Saudi Arabia pays Affinity an annual fee of 1.25 percent of its investment, while the three other known investors pay between 1.25 and 2 percent in fees, though Affinity Partners would not disclose exactly how much.

This led the committee staff to estimate that through the end of 2024, a total of $157 million in fees will have been paid to Affinity Partners, with $87 million of that from Saudi Arabia. If the total amount is calculated just for three years based on 1.25 percent fee minimum for all investors, that would mean at least $112.5 million in total fees through July and at least $75 million from Saudi Arabia.

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To date, Affinity has invested in a variety of companies, including Shlomo Group, an Israeli car-leasing and financing company; Dubizzle Group, a Dubai-based online real estate site; EGYM, a Munich-based electronic fitness company; Mosaic, a California-based solar lending site; and Zamp, an Abu Dhabi-backed fast food company that operates more than 1,000 restaurants in Brazil. The pace of new investments has accelerated considerably this year, including the Israeli financial services firm Phoenix Holdings Ltd. and QXO, a building products company based in Connecticut.