Original Owners of GZ Mosque Site Rejected $18M, Sold Property for $4.8M

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As anyone with a home for sale right now can tell you, it’s a buyer’s market. When you receive a fair offer for your property, you take it.

Unless the property is at 45-47 Park Place in New York City, aka the site of the controversial Ground Zero mosque. The original owners of the buildings at that address, the Pomerantz family, inexplicably rejected an offer of $18 million in cash, then sold to prospective mosque builder Sharif El-Gamal for $4.8 million.

The arrangement has a number of people scratching their heads – not least among them Kevin Glodek, the real estate developer who tendered the $18 million offer in 2007. According to the New York Post, an agreement had been reached between Glodek and majority owners Kukiko Mitani and Melvin Pomerantz. Glodek had even received keys to the extant buildings. Then suddenly the owners reneged on the deal only to accept another at one fourth the original amount.

One possible explanation that has been advanced for the bizarre turn of events is the claim that Sharif El-Gamal offered a job as property manager to Sethian Pomerantz, the son of the former owners. But that theory doesn’t pass the smell test either. Unless the son was virtually unemployable or the proposed salary would make up the $13 million difference in the two bids, why would the family agree?

Glodek is now wondering aloud whether money changed hands under the table. The $64,000 question is whether Attorney General Andrew Cuomo will wonder as well. There is already sufficient grounds for an investigation into the financing of the mosque. Yesterday, it was revealed that one of the principal investors, Hisham Elzanaty, donated $6,000 to the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, a front for the terrorist group Hamas.

Another detail that doesn’t jibe with the sale to the mosque builder is Mitani’s obviously false claim that she was desperate to sell the property, which was damaged in the 9/11 attacks, and had no buyers other than El-Gamal.

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