For those who wonder why Donald Trump skirts the rules and doesn’t believe people who give him advice?
Look no further then the man HIMSELF…..
The Washington Post runs a look at what House, Justice Department and AG’s in NY, NJ and NC are checking and re-checking under the hood in ALL thing financial with Donald Trump….
Their piece points to Trump & Co. stretching the truth in representing his net worth and business assets …..
While the some of this is civil in nature…..
Criminal issue’s of fraud COULD come up….
In the past?
When media reported on Trump’s slight of words actions….
He has gone after them in court to try to dissuade them from reporting on his business and ‘other ‘affairs..
Since the 1980s, Trump has defined himself by his wealth, but he has often avoided providing proof to back up his boasts or provided documents that inflated the real values. As president, Trump has declined to release his tax returns, unlike every president since Jimmy Carter.
Trump is far from the first real estate developer to inflate his projects or wealth. But there are laws against defrauding insurers and lenders with false information. Financial and legal experts said it’s unclear at this point whether Trump will face any legal consequences. They said it depends on whether Trump intended to mislead or whether the misstatements caused anyone to give him a financial benefit.
“How much would [the errors] impact an investor?” said Kyle Welch, an assistant professor of accountancy at George Washington University. “If it’s systematic and it’s across the board, and it’s all in one direction, that’s where you have a problem.”
Welch said Trump could be protected by disclaimers that his own accountants added to the statements, warning readers that they weren’t seeing the full picture. And in an odd way, Welch said, Trump could be helped by the sheer scale of the exaggerations. They were so far off from reality, Welch wondered whether any real bank or insurer could have been fooled.
Welch said he’d never seen a document stretch so far past the normal conventions of accounting.
“It’s humorous,” Welch said. “It’s a humorous financial statement.”
Investigators for the New York State Department of Financial Services, which sent subpoenas to Aon, and the New York State attorney general — who subpoenaed Deutsche Bank — declined to comment. Aon and Deutsche Bank also declined to comment, beyond saying they plan to cooperate with investigators.
The story of Trump’s “statements of financial condition” — in essence, sales brochures for Trump the man, given out by Trump the company — goes back to the early 1980s, according to past testimony from Trump’s accountants and staffers.
In 2007, a Trump lawyer named Michelle Lokey said she had sent these statements out to Trump’s lenders, for projects in Chicago and Las Vegas, because Trump had personally guaranteed those loans. That meant that if Trump’s company defaulted on its obligations, the lenders could come after Trump’s personal assets.
Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago was one of the two properties that were not included in some Trump financial statements. Both buildings were carrying mortgages. (Joshua Lott for The Washington Post)
“Therefore they’d want information on his net worth?” an attorney asked Lokey.
“I assume,” she said.
The statements were prepared by Trump’s longtime accountants, a firm now called Mazars. In other contexts — such as when one of Trump’s companies was seeking to secure a federal contract — this firm prepared rigorously audited financial statements.
This was a different sort of job.
When compiling these statements of financial condition, those accountants have said they did not verify or audit the figures in the statements. Instead, when Trump provided them data, they wrote it down without checking to see whether it was accurate.
“In the compilation process, it is not the role of the accountant to assess the values,” said Gerald J. Rosenblum, one of the accountants. “The role is to accept those values and move them forward.”
An attorney asked: Do the values have to be logical?
“The value per se does not have to be logical,” Rosenblum said. He and Lokey were deposed as part of a lawsuit in which Trump sued a New York Times reporter for allegedly lowballing his net worth. Trump’s suit against the reporter was later dismissed….
image…DenverPost
Note…
No Bank is gonna want to entertain fraud charges against a sitting President that has NO problem trying to use the powers of his office to punish someone who might put his ass in trouble….