Trump ally charged with acting as agent of foreign nation

By Paul R. La Monica, CNN Business

A blank-check firm backed by Tom Barrack, the billionaire investor who was chairman of Donald Trump’s inaugural committee in 2017 and is a close friend of the former president, has withdrawn plans to take the company public after Barrack was charged with illegal foreign lobbying earlier this week.

Falcon Peak Acquisition Corp., which had applied with the Securities and Exchange Commission in March for an initial public offering of stock, said in an SEC filing Friday that it was requesting a withdrawal of the registration.

News about the canceled IPO was announced just before a judge ordered Barack released from jail on a $250 million secured bail bond. The federal magistrate judge said Barrack must wear a GPS location monitoring bracelet and return to court in Brooklyn Monday for his arraignment.

Falcon Peak had said in March that it had hoped to go public so that it could then merge with a tech firm in a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, deal.

The company didn’t spell out its decision to abandon the IPO, saying merely that “the Company has elected to abandon the transactions.”

The planned SPAC was set to be managed by Barrack’s family office firm Falcon Peak Partners and Los Angeles-based investment company TI Capital Management.

TI, whose phone number is listed in SEC filings as the contact for the IPO, had no comment when asked about the withdrawal by CNN Business.

Meanwhile, another Barrack linked company called DigitalBridge Group — a real estate firm founded by Barrack that was formerly known as Colony Capital —have fallen about 6% this week following the indictment news.

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