James claims that Trump and his associates submitted “grossly inflated” numbers to banks and insurers each year between 2011 and 2021 “to secure and maintain loans and insurance on more favorable terms.”
They allegedly fraudulently overvalued the net worth of Trump company assets by billions of dollars, resulting in “hundreds of millions of dollars in ill-gotten savings and profits.”
James has alleged that the overvaluation of Trump’s assets was between $1.9 billion and $3.6 billion per year.
– ‘Fantasy world’ –
In his ruling, Engoron accused Trump, who gave a sworn deposition in the case, and his attorneys of “reliance on bogus arguments.”
“In defendants’ world: rent-regulated apartments are worth the same as unregulated apartments; restricted land is worth the same as unrestricted land,” the judge said. “This is a fantasy world, not the real world.”
Among the properties falsely overvalued — by between $114 million to $207 million — was Trump’s apartment in Manhattan’s Trump Tower, whose square footage was given as 30,000 square feet when it is actually 10,996 square feet.
“A discrepancy of this order of magnitude, by a real estate developer sizing up his own living space of decades, can only be considered fraud,” the judge said.
Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has denounced the case as a “witch hunt,” calling James, who is a Democrat and Black, “racist.”
In January, the Trump Organization was fined $1.6 million by a New York judge in a criminal tax and financial fraud case.
The 77-year-old twice-impeached Trump also faces federal criminal charges for the mishandling of classified documents and conspiracy charges for trying to overturn the 2020 election results.
He also faces charges in New York for alleged hush money payments to a porn star and in Georgia for pressuring officials to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential election victory in the southern state.
Trump was also found liable in a civil trial in May for sexually abusing a one-time magazine columnist in 1996 and for defaming her in comments made last year.
