This summer, our colleagues got a tip: President Trump’s daughter Tiffany and her husband were apparently cruising the Mediterranean aboard a Turkish billionaire’s yacht.
At the time, Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law, Massad Boulos, was conducting diplomacy as the senior State Department adviser on Africa. Career diplomats and senior officials in the Trump administration had privately expressed concerns about Mr. Boulos and his family’s business entanglements.
The yacht tip, we reasoned, might be an example of Trump family members benefiting from or associating with foreign business leaders who have stakes in American foreign policy.
If we could prove it.
Soon after the tip came in, Ms. Trump began posting dozens of photographs to Instagram of her family vacation aboard a yacht on the Côte d’Azur, France. Ms. Trump is married to Michael Boulos, Mr. Boulos’s son.
The Mediterranean in summer is full of yachts, and Ms. Trump’s images offered scant hints about which one she was aboard.
A video of a passing sailboat provided the first clue.
In the three-second clip, a sailboat — anonymous but for a “D3” on its sail — drifts past a rocky, mountainous coast. In the background is a high, arched bridge across a wooded valley. Comparing the arches of that bridge to photographs of other coastal bridges found a match: the Devil’s Bridge in Èze, France.
Given the bridge’s place in the video, Ms. Trump must have filmed it from the St.-Hospice Gulf.
As for the sailboat itself, the “D3” suggested that the boat was the Tuiga, the flagship of the Monaco Yacht Club. Using online shipping trackers, we quickly found that it had sailed through the St.-Hospice Gulf only twice in recent months, on July 27 and 28.
That narrowed our search considerably. For Ms. Trump to have filmed both the Tuiga and the Devil’s Bridge at the same time, she almost certainly had to have been aboard one of the yachts that had been anchored nearby at the time.
At this point, we used a feature-matching technique that we frequently employ on the Visual Investigations team. Searching for the yachts anchored in the gulf that day returned many pictures from charter and rental websites. We manually reviewed every one, looking for particular details — seats or paint colors, for example — that matched the images that Ms. Trump had posted.
Before long, a clear match emerged: the Phoenix 2, a nearly 300-foot yacht that ranked among the 100 longest in the world.
The Phoenix 2 was anchored a few hundred feet from where the Tuiga sailed on July 27.
Online photographs of the yacht’s railings and light fixtures matched several pictures and videos posted by Ms. Trump. In the background of one, a small, black speedboat with a distinctive wraparound windshield floats near the yacht. It was a match to the Phoenix 2’s smaller service boat, known as a tender.
Finally, Ms. Trump had posted a picture of herself lounging with her husband in an inflatable raft. A photograph from a trade publication, SuperYacht Times, showed that same raft attached to the Phoenix 2.
Little information was publicly available about the boat’s owner, but SuperYacht Times said that it was owned by “a Turkish businessman,” just as the initial tip had indicated.
Our colleagues spoke to several people in the yacht industry who identified the billionaire petrochemical moguls Ercument Bayegan and his wife, Ruya Bayegan, as the owners. A spokeswoman for Ruya Bayegan’s company, BGN International, said that Ms. Bayegan had not been on the Phoenix 2 at the time and that the guests had nothing to do with her company.
Ms. Trump posted her photographs in a batch, not in real-time. But we used MarineTraffic, a ship-tracking website, to confirm the location of the Phoenix 2 in the Mediterranean and French Riviera from the beginning of July to the end of August.
Then we used the backgrounds of Ms. Trump’s photographs — what other ships were pictured, for example — to identify when the images must have been taken. From the photographs and the locations, we were able to see that the Trump-Boulos family hopped between the Phoenix 2 and another yacht, the Magna Grecia, for at least 10 days.
The Magna Grecia, records show, is owned by a sprawling conglomerate controlled by the Greek billionaire Ioannis Papalekas. His company also has interests in the energy sector.
Mr. Papalekas also has a controlling interest in a company that runs a private estate on the island of St. Marguerite. The estate, known as Le Grand Jardin, rents for up to $290,000 per week. Photographs show that Ms. Trump and her mother, Marla Maples, spent time there while on their yacht trip.
Aric Toler contributed reporting.
Riley Mellen is a reporter on The Times’s Visual Investigations team, which combines traditional reporting with advanced digital forensics.
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