The New Yorker reports that the Trump Organization conducted business with the family of Ziya Mammadov, Azerbaijan’s minister of transportation, in order to develop a luxury property in the capital city of Baku. 

Mammadov family has a “troubling connection,” author Adam Davidson writes: “For years, it has been financially entangled with a family tied to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, which has been identified as a major supporter of international terrorism.”

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard is a major military, political, and economic force in Iran and in the Middle East. Domestically, it has ties to companies that oversee roughly $12 billion in capital for construction and engineering projects, including Iran’s nuclear defense programs. It has also helped finance terror organizations, including al-Qaeda and Hezbollah.

In 2012 the Trump Organization signed a deal with Mammadov’s family to build the Trump International Hotel & Tower Baku.

The Trump Organization’s legal officer Alan Garten said that it hired a third-party company to perform due diligence on the Mammadov family and found nothing alarming. Yet the Mammadov family is one of the most widely known oligarchs in Azerbaijan, and US diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks in 2009 repeatedly described him as corrupt.

In December 2016 the Trump Organization announced it would end its licensing deals in Azerbaijan and neighboring Georgia, in order to stave off potential conflicts of interest. In the case of the Baku project, however, it’s already too late—the building is nearly complete.

Davidson suggests that the Trump Organization might have violated sanctions placed against Iran and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard for conducting business with the Mammadov family.