"Within days, Donald Trump could potentially have his sprawling real estate business empire ordered ‘dissolved’ for repeated misrepresentations on financial statements to lenders, adding him to a short list of scam marketers, con artists and others who have been hit with the ultimate punishment for violating New York’s powerful anti-fraud law,” the AP reports.
“An Associated Press analysis of nearly 70 years of civil cases under the law showed that such a penalty has only been imposed a dozen previous times, and Trump’s case stands apart in a significant way: It’s the only big business found that was threatened with a shutdown without a showing of obvious victims and major losses.”
AP has been really pro-Trump the last several years. No victims? How is evading taxes victimless? We’re all paying for him.
There are multiple victims. First, as you say, there are the citizens of New York City and New York State. They have paid for the services that Trump’s empire there has utilized. His business could not exist without roads, utility lines, and all the other myriad services that taxes pay for. By not paying his fair share, the rest of the tax payers have had to subsidized his enterprise.
The other class of victim that rarely comes up is the banks themselves. Sure, the loans may have been repaid, well, except for that mysterious $48 million dollar loan that was forgiven. (By the way, how the hell do you get a bank to just up and forgive a $48 million dollar loan? Does that make any sense to anyone?) Anyway, my real point is that banks make profit from interest on loan repayment. The higher the risk of the loan, the higher the interest rate they charge. By falsifying the values of his properties, he was misleading the banks and getting more favorable interest rates than they would otherwise have given him. A bank that could have made a million dollars of interest on a given loan may only have made half a million because of his deception. I can’t really bring myself to feel sorry for a bank, but it does make them a victim of his crime.
The other victims are other people applying for loans. The banks might have been more inclined to give them loans, or give them loans at better interest rates, if their money wasn’t tied up in the loans they made to Trump’s business under false pretenses.
By the way, how the hell do you get a bank to just up and forgive a $48 million dollar loan? Does that make any sense to anyone?
“If you owe the bank $100, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.”
― J Paul Getty
Yeah, probably the whole explanation in a nutshell.
(By the way, how the hell do you get a bank to just up and forgive a $48 million dollar loan? Does that make any sense to anyone?)
My assumption is Mystery loan was paid off by somebody or floated by somebody as a form of bribe or money laundering. You know. Somebody like Putin, or the Saudis or similar. or the bank themselves.
Yeah, it could be. He is alleged to have done that sort of thing but this seems a little different, I think. Deutsche Bank supposedly loaned Trump money, even when nobody else would. They sold the debt to Vnesheconombank, the Russian state development bank. The Russian bank would then just never make Trump pay it. Essentially giving him a big pile of money and never expecting it back. Deutsche Bank did wind up paying a $630 million fine for participating in Russian money laundering.
Sounds a bit like…{turns head left, then right, then center and whispers}…socialism.
The loan seems to be between himself and one of his companies, so a bank didn’t forget about the loan. The significance is that not accounting for this loan correctly may have allowed him to evade taxes because it changed the valuation of his assets.
Another way of thinking about possible victims is that the banks probably would have loaned that money to someone. If it was an honest person or company (or rather more honest), then that money may have been used to generate more taxes than we’re paid, more public benefit, or both. Of course the bank gets their profits, but they are in theory supposed to benefit everyone so long as the system is working (I know there are many ways in which it is not) but when someone cheats the system they take an undue amount of that benefit for themselves.
The loan seems to be between himself and one of his companies, so a bank didn’t forget about the loan.
No, this was an actual lender forgiving $48 million in debt according to this article.
During his maneuvering, Trump convinced one of the entities funding that project—a financial firm called Fortress—to cut him a deal on the slightly less than $100 million they’d loaned him for the project. As prior reports show, Fortress eventually agreed to cancel half that original amount in 2012, forgiving Trump a total of $48 million.
The bank forgave the $48 million dollar loan. When a bank forgives a loan, it has to be reported as income. Trump instead reported that his Chicago Unit Acquisition LLC actually loaned him $48 million and that he paid off the loan with it. Essentially, he claimed that the debt went from Fortress to Chicago Unit Acquisition and he still had the debt. He didn’t though, it had been forgiven. That’s tax fraud.
Edit: forgiving, not forging.
Thanks, I didn’t see that in the initial reporting
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I’m really tired of so many people saying that doing something as a consequence for Trump’s actions would set a new precedent. So many things that he has done are unprecedented. There is no FAQ for when the president refuses to transfer power or when a “billionaire” politician is caught perpetrating decades of multitudes of types of fraud.
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The obvious victims in this case were NY taxpayers in general, and the major losses were the unpaid taxes that could have been used for any number of important and worthwhile public projects.
I cannot think of those for which Trump has more contempt. A dissolution of his so-called “empire” and a surrender of those assets to us, the People of New York, would be some sweet, sweet justice, as would banning both him and his sons from conducting business here, even if only for several years.
Not to mention the fact that it would completely and utterly destroy his identity as a “successful businessman“. 
Ultimately, the victims are kind of ancillary where fraud of this nature is concerned. Everyone involved could profit from the sale of cocaine, but that doesn’t make the sale any less illegal. Likewise, you don’t get to lie on your appraisal forms to game the system and generate free money, because that has long-term economic impacts far beyond the scope of direct victims.
I disagree. The victims only seem ancillary because they’re the faceless public. That doesn’t decrease the wrong committed nor the importance of the justice sought, nor even the value of the remedy issued by the court.
Just because the media can’t deliver it with a satisfying “SLAMS” or “WRECKS” or whatever superlative sells headlines this week takes nothing away from the scale of such a victory, should such a judgement be reached. The only losers would be the media for lack of some salacious story to sell with clicks to bait— and that’s not the point of any of this.
And Trump, of course. Isn’t that enough?
Yeah, and that’s why I said “kind of.” The faceless public is certainly the victim (as is always the case with anything related to Trump), but it’s really hard to personify a nebulous group that will be indirectly affected in the coming years (or were affected in ways unseen over the years).
Fraud was committed, and fraud laws exist to protect the public and the markets from that kind of manipulation at their expense.
The public is t harder to personify, they - we - are just less interesting and less salacious. “The public” being ripped off for the trillionth time doesn’t bait clicks and sell headlines. It doesn’t keep people glued to CNN and Fox News 24/7 with outrage watching ads for whatever they’re selling.
The media can’t sell your “kind of”
some legal experts worry that if the judge goes out of his way to punish the former president with that worst-case scenario, it could make it easier for courts to wipe out companies in the future.
Oh no, companies may not get to act criminally without consequences anymore…
So we’re gonna just keep lowering the bar to spare this loser’s feelings?
Lowering the bar would be not doing what they would regularly do. Doing something that has never been done against him would be setting a new bar.
It has been done. 12 times. Did u miss that part?
Per the article, this would be the first time it was done with no victim and no major losses. Did u miss that part?
The victim is the taxpayers of New York. The losses are the amount that they could not collect.
Did the prosecution even argue that in court? I don’t recall seeing it. The argument was that he was vastly overestimating the value of his properties to get favorable loan terms, not underestimatkng to avoid to taxes. I believe the tax valuation was used against him to show he lied when going for the loans, but I’ve not seen any argument that he substantially underestimated the property value to avoid taxes.
If they had been going after him for tax evasion, the charges would be different, i believe.
(edit) lol Downvotes but no explanation. I love this place sometimes.
“Is he getting his just desserts because of the fraud, or because people don’t like him?”
The AG prosecuting this doesn’t even want his businesses dissolved:
For her part, New York Attorney General Letitia James has asked that Trump be banned from doing business in New York and pay $370 million, what she estimates is saved interest and other “ill-gotten gains.” But she never asked for a property sale and may not even want one. Said one of her lawyers, Kevin Wallace, in his closing argument, “I don’t think we are looking for anything that would cause the liquidation of business.”
$370 million is a hefty sum, though. And the fact that the AG admits that it would not cause a 'dissolution of the business" means that she thinks the penalty can be extracted without liquidating everything… But Trump wouldn’t be allowed to be in charge of whatever’s left.
Good luck enforcing that last part, though. Whoever ends up taking over the business will probably need to get a new phone number, and make sure Trump never finds out what it is.
I love how these idiots continuing to commit fraud even after knowing they were under investigation and to this day insisting nothing is wrong with the fraud is somehow a valid legal reason/excuse to go easy on them. All that does is make others want to max out the crazy with their own fraud, since there’s now precedent for them to lean on when they get caught.
Already imposed a dozen times??? So you’re saying there’s precedent?? Lol
For “no losses” I sure do see a huge loser.
And again, there are millions of dumbfucks out there, who think THIS is what a ‘real’ president is. This is a guy who would happily make his voterbase, fend for themselves in the arctic cold, if it meant he got the warmest spot.
And if you still vote for this kind of person, you’re a thoroughbred fucking moron. Beyond helping.
Unprecedented crimes require unprecedented punishments. Fuck whatever Trump simp wrote this article.
Funny how the rich frame and define who is a victim and when. They get to escape justice by constantly moving goal posts.
How does this jibe with lenders being duped and stories about enormous losses?
According to the article, the businesses that were dissolved were in the midst of ongoing scams of the general public, and dissolving the companies was seen as the best way to contain the damage.
Trump’s fraud was comfined to banks, who are supposed to do due diligence on their customers, and are in a position to absorb losses. That doesn’t excuse Trump’s fraud, but it does suggest that simply removing the Trumps from the ability to do business in the state (along with that hefty financial penalty) would be enough.
And I think forcing the remainder of Trump’s businesses in NY to continue under someone else’s leadership will sting him more than if the State just liquidated it all.
I see that the headline was changed from “Dissolved” to “Taking away”. Those are quite different outcomes!
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