More problems for Donald Trump and increasingly serious. A jury in a New York court found the real estate company that bears his and his family's last name guilty of tax fraud and other financial crime charges on Tuesday. This ruling is a remarkable rebuke to the former president of the United States and what prosecutors described as a "culture of fraud and deception."
After two days of deliberation, the jury unanimously concluded that two entities of the Trump Organization (the Trump Corporation and the Trump Payroll Corporation) were guilty of a fifteen-year tax fraud that the indictment says was orchestrated by top executives, including its maximum headline, which consisted, among other ways, in providing juicy benefits to executives without appearing in the accounts.
In total, 19 charges. Executives received luxury apartments in fashionable areas, high-end cars, even very expensive private schools for their relatives, and none of this figured when paying taxes.
The real estate, hotel and golf complex, with headquarters on Fifth Avenue, will face the payment of a maximum of 1.6 million dollars. But that is the least of it with respect to the support that it supposes to the investigations of the chief prosecutor of Manhattan, Alvin Bragg.
His office already got Allen Weisselberg, the organization's longtime chief financial officer and one of Trump's most loyal servants, indicted last year. Weisselberg accepted a sentence in August as the architect of the fraud operation. Five months in jail, instead of fifteen. He has now been the main witness in this case, whose oral hearing has lasted four weeks. The other prosecution witness was auditor Jeffrey McConney, who pleaded guilty to him in exchange for immunity to testify before a grand jury.
The two explained how the scheme to cheat on state and federal taxes was hatched and worked.
Although the accusers did not take the step of impeaching the former US president, they did cite him during the trial. In his conclusion, the prosecutor told jurors that Trunp knew about it, that he approved of some aspects of the plan and that at times he was responsible for paying those benefits.
The condemnation of the company with his name, in conjunction with the explosive statement that it "explicitly sanctioned tax fraud", will have reverberation in the electoral campaign for the 2024 elections in which he already ran as a contender. This does nothing more than offer weapons against his rivals, inside and outside the Republican Party.
Furthermore, this verdict only sets the stage for Bragg to intensify the criminal investigation into Trump's business and practices, as well as possible criminality for the undeclared money he paid an adult movie star to keep quiet, before the 2016 elections, regarding the sexual relationship they had had.
According to some experts, this conviction for tax fraud, his plan to defraud, conspire and falsify the accounts represents a stone that could end the Trump Organization. This tinsel-like empire has always carried with it the suspicion that it was a criminal enterprise. But until now it had not been tested.
For Trump, this case is just another piece of evidence of what he calls the witch hunt launched against him. However, his lawyers did not deny that cheating took place in the accounting, but argued that it was the disloyal employees who perpetrated it. The jury has not believed them.
Chief Prosecutor Bragg welcomed the verdict. "The former president's companies are now convicted of crimes," he said in a statement after learning of the resolution. “This is consistent, this means that in Manhattan we have equal justice for all,” he added.
The next point on the horizon of their investigations appears to be Trump himself. Bragg has hired this week a special prosecutor, Matthew Colangelo, to help in the investigation. Colangelo is well aware of the matter allegedly practiced by Trump to hide his accounts and pay less taxes and obtain better credits because he participated in the case opened by the New York attorney general, Letitia James.
