Donald Trump allegedly inflated his net worth by
as much as $2.2bn in 2014
Lawyers for Letitia James, the New York attorney
general, claim the ex-president then used that blown up value for business
deals
Martin
Pengelly
@MartinPengelly
Thu 31 Aug
2023 06.00 BST
In 2014, a
year before entering politics and two years before winning the White House,
Donald Trump inflated his net worth by as much as $2.2bn, lawyers for the
attorney general of New York state alleged in court filings recently made
public.
Letitia
James, a Democrat, is seeking summary judgment in her multimillion-dollar civil
suit against the Trump Organization over its financial affairs.
Her office
said in the documents: “Mr Trump’s net worth in any year between 2011 and 2021
would be no more than $2.6bn, rather than the stated net worth of up to $6.1bn,
and likely considerably less if his properties were actually valued in
full-blown professional appraisals.”
According
to the state filing, corrections to financial statements for the 10-year period
in question would reduce Trump’s stated net worth by “17% [to] 39% in each
year, or between $812m to $2.2bn, depending on the year”.
Trial is
set for October. James’s lawyers argued no trial was needed “to determine that
defendants presented grossly and materially inflated asset values … and then
used those … repeatedly in business transactions to defraud banks and
insurers”.
James is
seeking $250m and for Trump and his sons to be disqualified from running
businesses in New York.
Lawyers for
Trump were due to file a response.
The former
president denies all wrongdoing, claiming political persecution in civil
lawsuits concerning his business affairs and a defamation claim arising from a
rape allegation as well as over 91 criminal counts regarding election
subversion, retention of classified documents and hush-money payments.
He did not
immediately comment on the New York estimation of how much he inflated his net
worth. But he has regularly accused James of being motivated by politics,
including in a failed countersuit.
Trump’s
financial affairs – his taxes and related claims about his personal wealth –
became a national obsession in 2016, when he beat Hillary Clinton for the White
House. Maggie Haberman, of the New York Times, has reported that Trump made up
his excuse for not following convention and releasing his tax returns literally
on the fly, on a campaign plane.
Chris
Christie, the former New Jersey governor then a Trump supporter, reportedly
told him there was no legal prohibition against releasing returns under audit.
Trump reportedly said he would ask his lawyers, but never proved to have done
so.
Christie is
now challenging Trump for the presidential nomination next year, as a rank
outsider willing to say Trump should never return to the White House. His
extreme legal predicament notwithstanding, Trump dominates polling.
Trump never
released his taxes but dogged and prize-winning reporting unearthed plentiful
evidence of sharp practice. Late last year, Democratic members of the Congress
released six years of Trump’s tax returns. Covering 2015 to 2020, they provided
plenty of embarrassing information.
Reporting
on proof that Trump and his wife, Melania, “paid $641,931 in federal income
taxes in 2015 … $750 in 2016 and 2017, nearly $1m in 2018, $133,445 in 2019 and
$0 in 2020”, the Guardian said: “Such numbers reflect heavy business losses and
undermine Trump’s self-perpetuated narrative of commercial wealth and success –
a crucial part of his brand during his successful 2016 campaign.”
In the
filings made public on Wednesday, lawyers for the New York attorney general
seemed confident they would win their case.
“Notwithstanding
defendants’ horde of 13 experts,” they wrote, “at the end of the day, this is a
documents case, and the documents leave no shred of doubt that Mr Trump’s
[statements of financial condition] do not even remotely reflect the ‘estimated
current value’ of his assets as they would trade between well-informed market
participants.”
Among
seasoned Trump-watchers, news of the contention that Trump inflated his net
worth generated attention but little surprise.
Tim
O’Brien, a Bloomberg editor and author of the biography TrumpNation: The Art of
Being the Donald, simply said: “Of course.”
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