MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Macri-Trump families links much closer that believed; Ivanka speaks to Argentine president

“At the end of the president's call with Trump, the phone was passed to Ivanka so he could say hello. They have known each other since she was quite young,”

Ivanka Trump, daughter of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, briefly joined her father's telephone call with Argentine President Mauricio Macri earlier this month, Macri's spokesperson said on Tuesday.

 The two men spoke on Nov. 14, making Macri one of few Latin American leaders who had spoken with Trump in the days following his surprise victory in the U.S. presidential election. The call was aimed at rekindling a relationship formed when they worked as businessmen before entering politics.

“At the end of the president's call with Trump, the phone was passed to Ivanka so he could say hello. They have known each other since she was quite young,” the spokesman said in an emailed response to a question about the call from Reuters news agency.

The congratulatory call was aimed at re-establishing the “personal bond” that the two men formed while doing business together, Argentine Foreign Minister Susana Malcorra said, although Macri had publicly expressed his preference for Democrat Hillary Clinton in the Nov. 8 election.

The Macri spokesman denied reports in the Argentine press on Monday that during the call Trump mentioned a pending office tower project that the real estate mogul has been trying to get approved by city regulators in Buenos Aires.
Photographs taken inside a meeting room at Trump Tower last week showed Trump was also accompanied by Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner when he met with Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

The son of one of the richest men in Argentina, Macri ended 12 years of populist rule in Latin America's third-largest economy when he took office last December. He was one of the regional presidents who have worked hardest to improve relations with the United States under President Barack Obama.

Macri met Trump decades ago while working for his father, Francisco Macri. According to a book by the elder Macri, his son beat Trump in a golf game during a complicated real estate deal in New York in the 1980s, and Trump broke his clubs after the game in frustration, and definitively condemned the project.