- Since at least 2004, Trump has issued financial statements boasting of his billions of dollars in assets.
- The latest was sent in 2021, just as NY officials were starting to openly call it a scam.
- The fraud monitor now says Trump “does not intend to develop any estimate of value” going forward.
It was the end of a mistake. Or, by New York Attorney General Letitia James’ count, the end of at least 200 mistakes.
According to the latest report from a court-mandated fraud monitor, Donald Trump is officially no longer bragging about his wealth in the inflated net worth reports he used to submit every year.
In fact, the report says, Trump has stopped officially listing the value of his personal property. In other words, he is no longer willing to say “I’m rich” in any financial documents that could hurt him.
Trump fraud monitor Barbara Jones outlined this new commitment to caution in a footnote to her latest report, which became available in online court records last week.
Jones is a retired federal judge who has been monitoring Trump’s real estate empire, the Trump Organization, for nearly two years, since Attorney General and state Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron uncovered a decade of persistent fraud in the annual net worth reports.
“Based on discussions with the Trump Organization, my understanding is that the Trump Organization does not intend to develop any estimate of value for any entity, the Trump Organization as a whole, or the guarantor collateral,” Jones wrote.
Any lender or “counterparty” seeking assurance on Trump’s abilities would be required to conduct their own assessment.
“If the need arises to determine the value of such an entity or asset, the Trump Organization will first notify the counterparty in order to develop its own estimate of value (which may be based on information or access provided by the Trump Organization),” the footnote said.
Alternatively, “the Trump Organization will retain an independent appraiser to develop a value estimate,” the footnote continued.
The decision to stop disclosing his wealth annually is a departure for Trump. He has been publishing these net worth statements — 20- to 30-page balance sheets officially called Statements of Financial Condition — since at least 2004.
Based on evidence and testimony in James’ five-year fraud case, Trump sent these “SOFCs” to anyone he wanted to impress.
He sends them to Forbes every year in hopes of landing a spot on the “400 Richest People in America” list.
He sent it to insurance companies in hopes of lowering his premiums. He also sent it to banks, which he hoped would approve low-interest loans for a variety of purposes, including his 2014 bid to buy the Buffalo Bills and his golf course development and luxury hotel in Washington, D.C.
“I hope you’re impressed!” Trump wrote to a Deutsche Bank executive in a cover letter to his 2011 net worth statement, which the attorney general eventually showed overstated his net worth by $2.7 billion.
Not everyone trusts Trump’s numbers, including his own outside accounting firm, Mazars USA. The firm declared its entire net worth report for the previous decade unreliable in 2022, and said it would stop compiling it.
Deutsche Bank, Trump’s most savvy lender, also responded skeptically to the claims, even as it lent him more than $400 million ($125 million for his Miami golf resort, $107 million for his Chicago skyscraper, and $170 million to convert the Old Post Office in Washington, D.C. into a luxury hotel).
The bank typically lowers Trump’s numbers by a certain percentage — an adjustment they call the “Trump haircut” — largely to account for what they allege are his exaggerations.
Forbes also carefully fact-checked the claims, and adjusted Trump’s wealth accordingly. It was the magazine that first discovered that Trump had been claiming for five years — in statements issued from 2012 to 2016 — that his Trump Tower triplex penthouse in Manhattan was 30,000 square feet when it was actually just under 11,000 square feet.
“A discrepancy of this magnitude, committed by a real estate developer who has valued his own residence for decades, can only be considered fraud,” Engoron said. wrote in September’s important pretrial fraud findings.
Every statement Trump issued between 2011 and 2021 was ultimately found to be full of fraudulent exaggerations, first by James’ team of lawyers and investigators, and then by the trial judge, Engoron.
Over the decade, the statements generated an additional $1.9 billion to $3.6 billion in fantastic forgeries each year. In all, there were about 200 misrepresentations, James said.
Throughout a decade of net worth reporting, Trump ignored generally accepted accounting principles, the attorney general and judge found.
He claimed to have cash he didn’t have. He ignored assessments, deed restrictions, zoning restrictions and rent control mandates that should have significantly lowered the value of his properties. He changed his appraisal methodology without notice, and included intangibles like “brand value” despite saying in a statement that he didn’t.
The fraud continued for five years as James sent out subpoenas, took depositions, examined accounts, and took Trump to court.
Trump’s boast that “I’m rich” also continues, just not on paper after his 2021 statement.
“We have a Lots cash,” he told James in a deposition in April 2023, half a year before the trial began.
“When we testify,” he added, “we’re going to get numbers that will blow your mind.”
Ultimately, the most shocking figure came from the judge, who said this about Trump’s reported net worth: “The fraud uncovered here leaps off the page and shocks the conscience.”
Trump was ordered to personally repay $454 million in ill-gotten gains, plus accrued interest — money he pocketed by defrauding his banks and insurance companies.
The amount he owes the state of New York will continue to increase by nearly $112,000 in interest every day — or $1 million every nine days — as his appeals process plays out in court over the next few years.
As of Thursday, its debt to the state reached $471 million.
