Key Facts to Know From the New York Times Tax History About Big Trump
According to a blockbuster published in the New York Times , President Donald Trump has been involved in some shady tax practices associated with his father’s real estate empire , including “cases of outright fraud” and evasion.
The Times reviewed over 100,000 documents over the past year, including never-before-seen lawsuits, legal and financial filings, tax returns, and testimonies from family members and business partners. Here is the result:
Most of [$ 413 million] went to [Donald] Trump because he helped his parents evade taxes. He and his siblings founded a fictitious corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, tapes and interviews show. Records show Mr Trump helped his father lift millions of dollars in inappropriate tax deductions. He also helped formulate a strategy to underestimate his parents ‘hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of property in tax returns, drastically cutting tax costs when that property was transferred to him and his siblings.
You should definitely read the entire 14,000-word story in its entirety (maybe even take a print edition) or read the Times summary . In the meantime, here are some of the more interesting parts of the story:
This $ 1 million loan was actually $ 60.7 million.
Trump loves to brag about the ” $ 1 million loan ” he got from his father that helped him become the alleged billionaire he is today, but the Times found that he actually received $ 60.7 million in the original loan. or about $ 140 million in today’s dollars.
Trump’s siblings escaped inheritance taxes with some … creative business maneuvers
The article describes the extreme measures the Trumps went to to avoid paying the then 55 percent inheritance tax (the last GOP boogeyman ) and gift tax on various transfers of property and wealth.
The worst, at least according to the experts cited in the article , was the formation of a company called All County Building Supply & Maintenance.
On paper, All County was Fred Trump’s purchasing agent, buying everything from boilers to cleaning supplies. But in reality, All County was a paper-only company, as tapes and interviews show, a vehicle for siphoning cash out of Fred Trump’s empire by simply marking up purchases already made by his employees. Those millions of markups, virtually tax-free gifts, then passed on to the owners of All County – Donald Trump, his siblings and cousin.
Basically, All County bought various building goods, such as boilers, and then “the secretary would bill Fred Trump’s buildings at a 20 to 50 percent markup.” Trump and his siblings have appropriated the difference.
In addition to hiding millions of dollars in this “fictitious” company, whose legitimacy was called “highly suspicious” by one expert, the family transferred most of the company’s property from Fred Trump to the president and his siblings before the patriarch passed away. … “The mechanism they created to do this was a special kind of trust called a Trustee Annuity Trust, or GRAT.”
This meant that siblings avoided taxes, and after the death of Fred Trump, he only owned a fraction of the property that once made up his real estate empire, according to a real estate tax return obtained by the Times .
However, Donald and two of his siblings grossly underestimated some of the condominiums and malls left for inclusion in the return. According to the Times , while the Trumps claimed the complexes and malls were worth $ 15 million, “in 2004, records show, bankers would have valued the exact same properties at $ 176.2 million.” In addition, “Fred Trump’s tax return does not mention either Trump’s Palace or All County,” which means they have avoided paying tens of millions of inheritance taxes, according to the Times .
Trump became famous for “greenmailing” in the 80s.
Here’s a fun detail in the report: In the 1980s, Donald Trump manipulated stock prices by leaking his positions to the press so he could sell it at a premium, or force the company to pay him a premium to get the stock back and, in effect, Walk away. It turns out that Fred Trump was the “slave” to manipulate his son’s shares:
On January 26, 1989, Fred Trump bought 8,600 shares of Time Inc. for $ 934,854, as his tax returns show. Seven days later, Dan Dorfman, a financial columnist known to have chatted with Donald Trump, broke the news that Trump Jr. “took a significant stake” in Time. Of course, Time’s stock jumped, allowing Fred Trump to make a profit of $ 41,614 in two weeks.
Apparently, this was a fairly common business practice in the 80s, and today it is not uncommon for activist investors to make a similar move.
Trump received a total of at least $ 413 million from his father’s empire
So no, it’s not homemade. In case it was not clear.
The Times described some of the actions as fraudulent.
This is a rare move, especially for the Times , and shows how confident the newspaper is in its reporting. Fraud and evasion are not “assumed” or written to be implied – they are simply called fraudulent.
A Google search and a boiler room receipt were central to the Times uncovering the story.
In a follow-up to how the story converged , the times “Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner, two of the three reporters who wrote the story with David Barstow, explain that Google’s search for” mortgage debt “and getting a boiler-house personal injury lawsuit helped immensely. their reports.
In 2017, Craig googled “Mortgage Receivables,” as the family described the mortgages given by Fred Trump to his children, in various documents along with Trump, and found the following:
She found that the disclosure form that President Marianne’s sister, a federal judge, had filed was related to her Senate hearing. Unlike many she has filed over the years on the bench, this one hasn’t been edited. In this document, Ms Craig noticed a $ 1 million contribution from an obscure family company: All County Building Supply & Maintenance.
Craig says that “this was the first suspicion that we should find out something related to this company.” Buttner later found a receipt that helped them understand even more about Trump’s All County premium scheme:
[This] team matched the boiler receipt from the personal injury lawsuit that Mr. Buettner discovered, naming All County (Trump’s boiler victim), with the boiler receipt they received at the FOIA’s request in New -York. They found two identical purchase order numbers, including an invoice from All County to Fred Trump in which the price of a boiler increased 20 percent.
“This is a rare moment when you can talk about intuitive foresight, right?” says Buettner.
Reporters note that the reports indicate that there is still a lot more to be revealed.
Trump calls fraud allegations “defamatory”
Charles Harder, the president’s attorney, told the Times in a statement that “the New York Times ‘ allegations of fraud and tax evasion are 100% false and highly libelous.”
Trump tweeted this morning :
The Failing New York Times did something I have never seen before. They used the concept of “time value of money” when writing a very old, boring and often-told article about me. In sum, this means that 97% of their stories about me are bad. Never recovered from a bad pre-election call!
I leave it to you to decipher what this means.
None of this runs counter to family backstabbing, the president’s extensive history of bad deals, or the creation of the self-made man myth detailed in the report. But if this whole story really becomes a “hit,” the president may be able to finally release his tax returns and clear his good name.