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I don’t disagree that some of the other valuations look off to me. My point is why the exaggeration on Mar-a-Lago which is the easiest one for the average person to look up and conclude the judge is an idiot. Property taxes in perhaps all locations but certainly many are not marked-to-market or anything close to market. They are often well below market (sometimes above market too often in poorer areas). The goal is that if one house is worth 20 million (market) and another is worth 10 million (market) that the assessed values would have a similar 2x to apply mileage rates too. It just seems silly to me they would even quote that. I’m not sure why the prosecutor would even feed that data to the judge because it’s not a market value and makes them look stupid.
He probably did knowingly exaggerate for his own self-worth ego. The key thing here is the statements on these values was not a key point to underwriting the loans and had no effect on any loan terms. There is no victim here the banks would have done the same deals regardless of what he said on the forms. It’s like if I call Amex to get a credit card and I asks for a $10 million limit. My portfolio lets even call it public markets so exact values is worth $1 billion but I tell them $2 billion. The bank doesn’t care I exaggerated.
I briefly read through the ruling so I might have missed it, but how are you certain the over-valuation of these properties didn't affect the terms or availability of any loan/insurance/financial agreement?
The bank absolutely does care about your debt-to-asset ratio for a multitude of reasons, but more importantly they care if you're a liar.
A $10 million loan to someone with $1-2b in assets is likely a low risk for default. A $10 million loan to someone who lies on their financial statements is a reputational and financial risk.
He wasn’t directly borrowing against these properties. The debt was on other properties that were underwritten. High other assets only come into play if something goes wrong on those properties. So it could matter but if the loan was debatable I would assume the banks would underwrite the quality of his personal guarantee more than just rubber stamping what he submitted.
Right - and his personal guarantee is based on the valuation of his assets, which he overstated.
Find me one case with precedence here where a little exaggeration on this specific form with zero victims was pursued.
It's going to be pretty hard to find cases where there's no egregious harm because they would normally go undetected. And once there is harm, your company is probably insolvent and not worth pursuing by OAG.
If you're pointing out that this only got investigated because it's Trump, I agree. Unfortunately for him, the investigation uncovered a crime.
Actually this is in civil court not criminal which heavily indicates how weak of a case it is. Beside it being very rare for a civil case that isn’t origionating from a victim.
That's not true. The NY attorney general doesn't have the authority to indite Trump on criminal charges.
Similar to the SEC (whose cases are also civil), they refer their investigations to a separate authority who might be interested in pursuing any criminal charges in addition to the civil case.
I believe the OAG has referred this case to the Manhattan DA, though as they're already prosecuting Trump for a separate case, I'm not sure if they'll decide to file criminal charges.
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The bank doesn't care if you commit fraud on loan paperwork for huge amounts of money? Why would you think that is true?
Like yeah they're not going to go after a first time home owner for rounding their income up from $117k to $120k. But when you start talking about hundreds of millions of dollars and your ability to repay it I think actually they do care.
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