The Trump Organisation has been branded a felonious actor, but the financial punishment is relatively light. Photo / John Taggart
The Trump Organisation has been branded a felonious actor, but the financial punishment is relatively light. Photo / John Taggart
Donald Trump’s family real estate business was convicted on Tuesday (Wednesday NZ time) of tax fraud and other financial crimes, a remarkable rebuke of the former president’s company and what prosecutors described as its “culture of fraud and deception.”
The conviction on all 17 counts, after more than a dayof jury deliberations in state Supreme Court in Manhattan, resulted from a long-running scheme in which the Trump Organisation doled out off-the-books luxury perks to some executives: They received fancy apartments, leased Mercedes-Benzes, even private school tuition for relatives, none of which they paid taxes on.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which led the case against two Trump Organisation entities, had previously extracted a guilty plea from the architect of the scheme, Allen H. Weisselberg, the company’s long-serving chief financial officer. Weisselberg, one of the former president’s most loyal lieutenants, testified as the prosecution’s star witness, but never implicated Trump.
While prosecutors stopped short of indicting the former president, they invoked his name throughout the monthlong trial, telling jurors that he personally paid for some of the perks and even approved a crucial aspect of the scheme. The prosecution also sounded a drumbeat of damning evidence that spotlighted his company’s freewheeling culture, revealing that pervasive illegality unfolded under Trump’s nose for years.
The company’s conviction — coupled with the prosecution’s explosive claim at trial that Trump was “explicitly sanctioning tax fraud” — could now reverberate through the 2024 presidential race, providing early fodder for opponents and their attack ads.
It also might lay the groundwork for the district attorney’s office to intensify its wider criminal investigation into Trump’s business practices — and hush money paid to a porn star who said she had an affair with him — an inquiry that gained momentum in recent months, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
Donald Trump continues to face several state and federal probes stemming from conduct in his business and political lives. Photo / Jamie Kelter Davis, The New York Times
The conviction on charges of tax fraud, a scheme to defraud, conspiracy and falsifying business records is hardly a death sentence for the Trump Organisation. The maximum penalty it faces is US$1.62 million, a rounding error for Trump, who typically notched hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue during his presidency.
Yet the verdict represents a highly public reckoning for the Trump Organisation, forever branding it as a felonious enterprise. A company that served as a launchpad for the former president’s tabloid celebrity, his star turn on The Apprentice and ultimately his political career, might now be best known for its conviction, rather than the hotels and golf clubs that Trump spent a generation building.
The former president has blamed it all on a politically motivated witch hunt. But while his attacks on prosecutors might appeal to his most loyal voters, lenders and the broader business world might now shun his company.
In a statement after the verdict, the company took aim at Weisselberg, noting that he “testified under oath that he ‘betrayed’ the trust the company had placed in him.”
“The notion that a company could be held responsible for an employee’s actions, to benefit themselves, on their own personal tax returns is simply preposterous,” the company said in the statement.
