Conflicting information
Oh interesting. Can you say “two sets of books”? Pro Publica tells the tale:
Donald Trump’s business reported conflicting information about a key metric to New York City property tax officials and a lender who arranged financing for his signature building, Trump Tower in Manhattan, according to tax and loan documents obtained by ProPublica. The findings add a third major Trump property to two for which ProPublica revealed similar discrepancies last month.
In the latest case, the occupancy rate of the Trump Tower’s commercial space was listed, over three consecutive years, as 11, 16 and 16 percentage points higher in filings to a lender than in reports to city tax officials, records show.
I’m sure it’s just coincidence that higher numbers are good to show lenders while lower numbers are good to show the tax people.
For example, as of December 2011 and June 2012, respectively, Trump’s business told the lender that 99% and 98.7% of the tower’s commercial space was occupied, according to a prospectus for the loan. The figures were taken from “borrower financials,” the prospectus stated.
In tax filings, however, Trump’s business said the building’s occupancy was 83% in January 2012 and the same a year later. The 16 percentage point gap between the loan and tax filings is a “very significant difference,” said Susan Mancuso, an attorney who specializes in New York property tax.
And Trump is a very significant liar and fraud.
More than a dozen tax and finance experts, presented with ProPublica’s earlier findings, also said they could not decipher a reason for the differences. As with Trump Tower, the discrepancies made the two properties — a skyscraper located at 40 Wall Street and the Trump International Hotel and Tower near Columbus Circle — appear more profitable to the lender and less so to property tax officials.
Those discrepancies were “versions of fraud,” according to Nancy Wallace, a professor of finance and real estate at the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley. The penalties for false filings can include fines or criminal charges.
But then Trump will put on his boxing pants and punch them all.
Reminds me of an account I read in Huberman and Sweezy’s study of the Cuban Revolution.
In the course of battling with United Fruit and other American companies which had come to dominate the entire Cuban economy under the previous (US-favoured) dictator Fulgencio Batista, the new Casto government found itself with no alternative but to nationalise them. But Castro offered the American owners a fair price: namely the value those same owners had previously registered for taxation purposes with Batista’s rotten government.
“Outrageous..!” was the response from the whole lot of them. So they got nationalised without compensation. That led straight to the Bay of Pigs fiasco, followed by the near-obliteration of most of civilisation and the planet as well in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
https://monthlyreviewarchives.org/index.php/mr/article/view/MR-012-03-04-1960-07-08_1
Re Trump’s boxing pants, I’m picturing something like Professor Elemental’s Fighting Trousers (but much, much wider, of course).