Alina Habba, Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, is getting married Saturday in New York. The groom is a 29-year-old Turkish businessman whose companies hold about a billion dollars in Congolese construction contracts and a cement deal in Venezuela. The president is expected to attend.
Who he is
Turhan Mildon is CEO of Miller Holding, a Turkish group working in energy, construction, shipping and international trade. He is part of a business family closely aligned with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Habba is 42. This is her third marriage. Mildon divorced his first wife in 2024. They met this year at a Kennedy Center event where he is a donor, and reporting says they plan to live in Florida.
The Congo contracts
Per Middle East Eye, Mildon’s company Milvest has secured roughly $1 billion in construction contracts in the Democratic Republic of Congo since 2021. Among them:
- The Kinshasa Financial Centre.
- A sports complex called the Arena.
- A recent $67 million contract to build a drone base in Kisangani.
Mildon has said Erdogan personally introduced him to Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi.
There have been disputes around the work. A former Congolese finance minister, Nicolas Kazadi, faced allegations of mismanaging funds during construction on Mildon’s projects, which he denied. The Arena project drew accusations of improperly obtaining import exemptions; Mildon said the dispute cost him eight months and millions.
The Venezuela deal
Through a company called Vencement, Mildon reached a profit-sharing agreement with Venezuela’s state-controlled cement authority to run ten revitalized cement plants.
The reporting says that arrangement followed negotiations with Alex Saab and Venezuela’s Ministry of Industries. Saab is a Maduro ally who was extradited to the United States on money laundering charges and later returned to Venezuela in a prisoner exchange.
Venezuelan officials later questioned why bags of cement were retailing at $32 to $37.
One loose thread
UK Companies House records list Mildon’s age as 25 rather than 29. Nobody has explained the discrepancy.
What is not alleged
This part matters and gets lost in stories like this one.
No one has accused Habba of wrongdoing in connection with any of it. No one has accused Mildon of a crime. The Congo and Venezuela deals are business arrangements in countries where doing business is complicated, and complicated is not the same as criminal.
Habba has said she would serve as White House press secretary if asked.
The BeezLoop Take
The gossip framing here is the wrong one and it lets everybody off easy. A 42-year-old woman marrying a 29-year-old man is nobody’s business, the Birkin bags are nobody’s business, and a third marriage is nobody’s business. Anyone leading with that is not actually interested in the part that matters.
What matters is the position. Habba was the president’s personal lawyer, served in his administration, and has said she would take a job speaking for the White House. She is marrying a man whose fortune runs through contracts awarded in Congo after a personal introduction from Erdogan, and a Venezuelan cement arrangement negotiated in part with a man the United States indicted for money laundering. When those two facts sit in the same household, the public interest is real regardless of whether anyone has done anything illegal.
That is not a partisan standard and it should not be applied as one. Hunter Biden’s foreign business arrangements were a legitimate subject while his father was president, and the people who said so were right. The test is whether proximity to American power could plausibly be worth something to a foreign counterparty, and here it obviously could. A Turkish group with Erdogan ties and a billion in African infrastructure now has a family connection to the inner circle of the American presidency.
The drone base is the detail that should draw the most attention and has drawn the least. A $67 million military facility in Kisangani, built by a contractor whose introduction to the government came from the Turkish president, whose new wife worked for the American one. That is three governments in one sentence, and no disclosure regime touches it.
None of which is a finding. We are describing a structure, not an accusation, and the difference matters. But the honest position is that this arrangement deserves ordinary scrutiny rather than a wedding photo spread, and the reason it will mostly get the second is that the coverage decided in advance which kind of story it was.
The question
Should the personal business ties of a president’s former lawyer be anyone’s concern if no law is broken? And if the answer is no here, was it no for every other administration too?
Related: the tech executives at Xi’s state dinner, and the FBI breach exposing agents’ personal data.
Sources: Middle East Eye · The Daily Beast · The New York Sun
