Former President Donald Trump angrily denounced the claim from the New York Attorney General that he has significantly inflated his net worth.
New York Attorney General Letitia James made the claim as part of the state’s lawsuit against Trump, the Trump Organization, and Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, accusing them of business fraud.
“Since at least 2011, Defendants and others working on their behalf at the Trump Organization have falsely inflated by billions of dollars the value of many of the assets listed on Donald J. Trump’s annual statement of financial condition (‘SFC’), and hence his overall net worth for each of these years,” James wrote in the memorandum. “Mr. Trump, and in some years the trustees of his revocable trust, submitted these grossly inflated SFCs to banks and insurers to secure and maintain loans and insurance on more favorable terms, reaping hundreds of millions of dollars in ill-gotten savings and profits.”
“The Court need answer only two simple and straightforward questions: (1) were the SFCs from 2011 to 2021 false or misleading; and (2) did Defendants repeatedly or persistently use the SFCs in the conduct of business transactions? The answer to both questions is a resounding ‘yes,’” the memorandum stated.
“THE THING I HAVE IS A GREAT CASE BASED ON PHENOMENAL NUMBERS THAT SHOW A NET WORTH BILLIONS OF DOLLARS MORE THAN SHE VICIOUSLY & FALSELY CLAIMED, VERY LITTLE DEBT, BIG CASH, A POWERFUL DISCLAIMER CLAUSE, PAID OFF LOANS, NO DEFAULTS, ‘HAPPY’ BANKS, GREAT ASSETS,” Trump responded on Truth Social Thursday, adding, “I WAS DEFAMED BY NYS – ELECTION INTERFERENCE!”
“Defendants followed the same procedure each year to create false and misleading SFCs,” the memo stated. “The SFCs include amounts for Mr. Trump’s assets, mostly real estate holdings, that are represented to be stated ‘at their estimated current values,’ a term defined in the applicable accounting rules as the value that a willing buyer and willing seller could agree on, where both are fully informed and neither is acting under duress. The associated liabilities are then subtracted from the ‘estimated current values’ to derive Mr. Trump’s net worth.”
“ … at the end of the day this is a documents case, and the documents leave no shred of doubt that Mr. Trump’s SFCs do not even remotely reflect the ‘estimated current value’ of his assets as they would trade between well-informed market participants. Instead, the undisputed evidence establishes that Defendants employed a variety of deceptive schemes to grossly inflate values for many of Mr. Trump’s assets,” the memo continued.
After enumerating various instances where Trump and his organization allegedly engaged in deceptive practices, the memo stated bluntly, “Correcting for these and other blatant and obvious deceptive practices engaged in by Defendants reduces Mr. Trump’s net worth by between 17-39% in each year, or between $812 million to $2.2 billion, depending on the year.”
The lawsuit wants the defendants to pay a $250 million fine and to ban the defendants from having businesses in New York.