By Alexander Cornwell
ABU DHABI (Reuters) -The Trump Organization, Donald Trump's family business, will have a "very large wall" separating its business activity from the U.S. government, the president-elect's son, Eric Trump, said in an interview with Reuters in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday.
The bulk of the Trump Organization's business is in the United States, although it has significant interests overseas, including in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
During his first term, Donald Trump retained ownership of the Trump Organization but placed control of the sprawling business empire in the hands of his sons Eric and Donald Jr.
"There's going to be, obviously, a very large wall between anything having to do with our company and anything to do with government," Eric Trump told Reuters at a Bitcoin conference.
"I take those obligations very seriously. I navigated it the first time, I'll do so the second time and, you know, I'll be ethically very smart, very responsible, as we did," he said.
The Trump Organization has a number of branded international projects under development including in Jeddah and Dubai, and announced new ones in the Saudi capital on Monday.
Eric Trump said the Trump Organization would continue to grow over the next four years when Donald Trump is in office, but that it was unlikely to do business deals directly with governments, adding: "I think that probably is a conflict."
He said the "best legal teams in the world" would sign off on the company's deals to avoid conflicts of interest.
"There's a way to do both, and there's a way to do them responsibly. And obviously, I'm committed to doing that."
In an address to the conference, Eric told a standing-room-only audience that Bitcoin represented a "financial revolution", and that his father would make the U.S. the crypto capital of the world by resisting overregulation and fighting obstruction.
To jeers from the crowd, he asked if anybody liked Gary Gensler, the Securities and Exchange Commission boss who has launched cases against several high-profile crypto figures, some of whom were also at the conference. Donald Trump has picked respected Washington lawyer Paul Atkins to succeed him.
"Gary Gensler waged war against the industry that we all love and everybody knows it," Eric Trump told the audience, praising Atkins as "an unbelievable ally to this incredible industry".
In the interview, Eric said his father had a great relationship with leaders in the Middle East, and that four years of "absolute hell and chaos" under the Biden administration would quickly go back to peace and stability.