After an investigation that has taken years and a series of legal clashes, the New York state attorney general, Letitia James, has accused the former president of systematically misstating the value of his properties.
Donald J. Trump, his family business and three of his children lied to lenders and insurers for more than a decade, according to the New York attorney general, Letitia James, who accused him of fraudulently overvaluing his assets by billions of dollars in a sprawling scheme, thereby violating several state criminal laws and “plausibly” breaking federal criminal laws as well. She is seeking to bar the Trumps from ever running a business in the state again.
The 220-page lawsuit, filed in New York State Supreme Court, lays out in new and startling detail how, according to Ms. James, Mr. Trump’s annual financial statements were a compilation of lies. The statements, yearly records that include the company’s estimated value of his holdings and debts, wildly inflated the worth of nearly every one of his marquee properties — from Mar-a-Lago in Florida to Trump Tower and 40 Wall Street in Manhattan, according to the lawsuit.
“The number of grossly inflated asset values is staggering, affecting most if not all of the real estate holdings in any given year,” according to the lawsuit. Mr. Trump has long used his net worth to construct a public persona as a self-made billionaire, an image that underpinned his initial run for the White House. But, according to Ms. James, he had a financial motivation for inflating his property values.
His company, the Trump Organization, provided the fraudulent financial statements to lenders and insurers, her suit said, “to obtain beneficial financial terms,” including lower interest rates and lower premiums. All told, Ms. James said, he was able to obtain a quarter of a billion dollars in ill-gotten gains, money that she now wants the company to forfeit.
In a statement, the Trump Organization noted that the company’s lenders “profited handsomely — to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in interest and fees” from their dealings with the company. The statement also attributed Ms. James’s action to “politics, pure and simple,” arguing that she “put her own political ambitions ahead of the safety of New Yorkers,” calling it “an abhorrent abuse of power, waste of valuable resources and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars.”
