- Since at least 2004, Trump has released financial statements boasting about his billion-dollar fortune.
- The most recent one was sent in 2021, just as New York City officials were publicly beginning to call it a scam.
- The fraud monitor now says Trump “does not intend to conduct any valuations” going forward.
This is the end of an error — or, by New York Attorney General Letitia James’s calculations, the end of at least 200 errors.
Donald Trump has officially stopped boasting about his wealth in his wildly inflated annual net worth statement, according to a court-mandated fraud watchdog’s latest report.
In fact, the report said, Trump even stopped publicly disclosing the value of his personal assets — in other words, he stopped stating “I’m rich” on any financial documents that could later be used against him.
Trump’s fraud watchdog, Barbara Jones, revealed the new caution in a footnote in her latest report, which was made public in online court records last week.
Jones, a retired federal judge, has been overseeing Trump’s real estate empire, the Trump Organization, for nearly two years since the Attorney General and state Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron discovered a decade of persistent fraud in Trump’s annual net worth reports.
“Based on discussions with the Trump Organization, it is my understanding that the Trump Organization does not intend to make any estimates of the value of any entity, the Trump Organization as a whole, or any of the guarantor’s collateral,” Jones wrote.
Lenders and “counterparties” who need to guarantee Trump’s value would be instructed to do their own valuations.
“If it becomes necessary to determine the value of any such entities or assets, the Trump Organization will first advise the other party to make its own independent estimate of valuation (which may be based on information or access provided by the Trump Organization),” the footnote reads.
As an alternative, “the Trump Organization will hire an independent appraiser to develop an estimate of value,” the footnote continues.
The decision to stop releasing annual financial figures marks a turning point for Trump, who has been releasing such statements — formally known as financial statements, 20-30 page balance sheets — since at least 2004.
According to evidence and testimony during James’ five-year fraud case, Trump would send these “SOFCs” to people he wanted to surprise.
Every year he sent them off to try and get a good spot on Forbes magazine’s list of America’s 400 richest people.
He sent the money to insurance companies in hopes of lowering his premiums, and to banks in hopes of approving low-interest loans for a variety of ventures, including his 2014 bid to buy the Buffalo Bills, developing golf courses and a luxury hotel in Washington, D.C.
“I think you’ll be impressed!” Trump wrote to Deutsche Bank executives in a cover letter for his 2011 net worth report, though the attorney general ultimately found that Trump’s net worth had been overstated by $2.7 billion.
Not everyone trusted Trump’s numbers, including outside accounting firm Mazars USA, which declared his entire net worth report for the past decade unreliable in 2022 and announced it would stop producing the reports.
Even Trump’s most savvy lender, Deutsche Bank, which has lent him more than $400 million — including $125 million for a golf resort in Miami, $107 million for a skyscraper in Chicago and $170 million to transform the Old Post Office in Washington, D.C., into a luxury hotel — is skeptical of the statement.
The bank typically reduced Trump’s figures by a percentage to compensate for what it considered to be exaggerations, a move it called the “Trump haircut.”
Forbes, which also carefully fact-checked the statement and revised down Trump’s wealth accordingly, was the first to discover that Trump, in statements made between 2012 and 2016, had for five years claimed that his three-story penthouse in Manhattan’s Trump Tower was 30,000 square feet, when in fact it was just under 11,000 square feet.
“For a developer to estimate his own residential space for decades and then have a discrepancy of this magnitude is simply fraud,” Engoron said. In September, he was convicted of pretrial fraud..
Every statement made by Trump from 2011 through 2021 was ultimately found to be full of wildly exaggerated falsehoods, first by James’ legal team and investigators, and then by Judge Engoron.
Over the past decade, the false tax returns have inflated tax figures by between $1.9 billion and $3.6 billion each year, with about 200 false tax returns in all, James said.
The attorney general and judge found that Trump ignored generally accepted accounting principles throughout his net worth reports over the past decade.
He claimed to have cash on hand when in fact he did not. He ignored appraisals, deed restrictions, zoning restrictions and rent control ordinances that would have significantly reduced property values. He changed his appraisal methodology without notice and included intangibles such as “brand value” even though in his statements he said he did not.
The fraud continued throughout the five years James spent serving subpoenas, taking depositions, reviewing calculations and putting Trump on trial.
Trump’s “I’m rich” boasts also continued, though not on paper since the 2021 statement.
“we Many “Cash on delivery,” he told James during testimony in April 2023, six months before the trial was set to begin.
“When we testify, we will come across some numbers that will shock you,” he added.
Ultimately, the most shocking figure came from the judge, who said of Trump’s statement about his net worth: “The misconduct uncovered here leaps off the page and shocks the conscience.”
President Trump was personally ordered to pay back $454 million in fraudulent profits, plus interest, obtained by defrauding banks and insurance companies.
His debt to the state of New York will continue to grow at about $112,000 in interest per day over the next few years, or $1 million every nine days, as his appeal plays out in the courts.
As of Thursday, his debt to the state stood at $471 million.
