Last month, Heather Vogell at the nonprofit investigative site ProPublica reported that property tax documents obtained under New York’s Freedom of Information Law show that, in the case of two buildings, Donald Trump’s businesses were made to look more profitable to lenders and less profitable to tax officials. Nancy Wallace, a professor of finance and real estate at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, told ProPublica that the discrepancies are “versions of fraud. This kind of stuff is not OK.”
The exposé was no surprise to those who have followed Trump’s empire over the years. Nor should it surprise anyone else that a guy who has lied more than 14,000 times about seemingly every matter under the sun since he stepped into the Oval Office nearly three years ago would also tell lies to pad his bottom line.
Vogell has now posted a new piece based on documents for Trump Tower. It looks like another chapter in the same vein. The lender got one set of numbers, the tax authorities got another.
In this instance, the lender was told the rate of occupancy over three consecutive years was 11, 16 and 16 points more than what was told to tax authorities. Specifically, for December 2011 and June 2012, a loan prospectus shows that the lender was told that 99% and 98.7% of the tower’s commercial space was occupied. But in tax filings, Trump operations said the building’s occupancy in January 2012 was 83%. Susan Mancuso, an attorney who specializes in New York property tax, said that the 16-point gap is a “very significant difference”:
The diverging numbers match a pattern described by Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, in congressional testimony this year. Cohen said Trump at times inflated assets’ value in documents submitted to lenders in an effort to secure loans. In reports to tax officials, Cohen testified, Trump would lower the value to reduce what he owed.
The focus on Trump’s business and personal financial records has been particularly intense of late. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. has subpoenaed a wide array of Trump financial records to investigate claims that the Trump Organization falsified records of hush-money payments to pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels, who said she and Trump had a sexual encounter. (He has denied the affair.)
Under New York City tax law, the person signing tax filings “affirms the truth of the statements made” and that “false filings are subject to all applicable civil and criminal penalties.” The penalties can be major, from hefty fines to charges of criminal fraud. Cohen and Paul Manafort are both imprisoned for crimes that include falsifying tax and bank records.
If charges ever are filed against Trump over these discrepancies, his innovative legal team will no doubt claim that once a person has occupied the presidency, they can no longer be investigated or charged with any crime no matter what.