Donald Trump (center), Ivanka Trump (right) and Donald Trump Jr (left) in Marietta, United States, January 4, 2021 (AFP / MANDEL NGAN)
Donald Trump Jr, the first of the Republican billionaire’s children to testify at his civil trial in New York for vast financial frauds, assured the court on Wednesday that he had not dealt with the financial documents at the center of the accusation.
The hearing of the eldest son of the former American president inaugurated a parade of the family clan which will continue with Eric Trump, then Donald Trump himself and Ivanka Trump, who however filed an appeal not to testify.
Executive vice-president of the Trump Organization, Donald Trump Jr, 45, is accused, like his father and his younger brother Eric, by the Attorney General of the State of New York, Letitia James, of having inflated to the height of billion dollars the group’s assets in the 2010s to obtain better loans from banks and more favorable insurance conditions.
Dark blue suit, light shirt and pink tie, Donald Trump Jr confirmed his role at the top of the Trump Organization, a myriad of companies managing housing and office skyscrapers, luxury hotels and golf courses around the world .
Who held the reins of the group after Donald Trump entered the White House in January 2017, asked the representative of the Attorney General’s Office Colleen Faherty? “A combination of myself, my brother (Eric) and Allen Weisselberg”, the former financial director sentenced in 2022 to prison for tax fraud, replied Donald Trump Jr, very at ease.
– “Leave my children” –
But he also presented himself as unfamiliar with accounting calculations. Held responsible by the public prosecutor’s office for Donald Trump’s annual financial declarations since 2016, a sort of photograph of his fortune at the center of the accusation, the eldest son explained that he had trusted their accounting firm, Mazars.
“I was not involved in the preparation” of these documents, “the accountants worked on it, that’s what we pay them for,” he assured. Without convincing Attorney General Letitia James. “Trump Jr. has a long history of involvement in his family’s fraudulent business operations,” she wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
The hearing took place most of the time in a cordial climate, far from the virulent attacks that Trump, father and son, usually make against justice.
“Leave my children alone, Engoron. You are a disgrace to the judicial profession,” Donald Trump Sr. posted overnight on his social network Truth Social, addressing Judge Arthur Engoron who is presiding over the proceedings and has already imposed $15,000 in fines for attacking his clerk.
Donald Trump, 77, is due to be questioned on Monday, almost a year before the 2024 presidential election which he hopes to contest to return to the head of the United States.
The defense assures that the evaluations of the group’s assets, such as the Trump Tower or the 40 Wall Street building, were subjective but sincere, and that the banks lost nothing.
– “Repeated frauds” –
But according to the head of the investment bank MM Dillon & Co., Michiel McCarty, called to the stand on Wednesday as an expert, lending banks, like Deutsche Bank, could have decided to set higher interest rates if they had had a less rosy picture of Donald Trump’s financial situation available.
He reviewed four loans to finance projects around a golf course in Florida, two luxury hotels in Washington and Chicago, as well as 40 Wall Street, and estimated interest losses at $168 million between 2014 and 2023 A calculation contested by the defense.
Donald Trump was absent from court on Wednesday. Since the start of the trial, he has posed as the victim of a legal scheme, as in the four other cases in which he is criminally charged, in particular for having tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Former US President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago (Florida, United States) on April 4, 2023 (AFP / CHANDAN KHANNA)
If he does not risk prison time in this civil trial, the case could cause him to lose control of part of his real estate assets, in addition to a fine of 250 million dollars and the ban on managing companies in New York.
Even before the opening of the debates on October 2, Judge Engoron estimated that the general prosecutor’s office presented “conclusive evidence that between 2014 and 2021, the defendants overvalued the assets” by “812 million (to) 2.2 billion dollars” depending on the year.
As a result of “repeated fraud”, he ordered the liquidation of the companies, a real legal bombshell, but his decision was suspended on appeal.
The lawsuit focuses on other violations of financial laws and the amount of the fine.