The New York judge who ruled on Tuesday that the former president committed fraud by inflating the value of many of his assets also authorized state Attorney General Letitia James to cancel certificates for companies that hold those assets. Judge Arthur Engoron said James, who sued Trump last year, could seek an order as well barring him and his companies from continuing to conduct business in New York.
Losing certificates would mean Trump could no longer do business in New York as he had before, said Janet Sabel, a former chief deputy at the state attorney general’s office. “But exactly how that plays out and what happens to his assets remains to be decided,” she said. “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,” Engoron said.Trump received market-value appraisals for the 200-acre New York property in 2000, 2006, 2012 and 2014 valuing it at $30 million or less. Even so, Trump’s 2011 statements of financial condition reported the value to be $261 million and reached as high as $291 million in 2014. An outside firm increased its valuation to $56.