The former president is accused of corrupting his relationship with banks and insurers for more than a decade by giving them financial statements that inflated the value of his assets by billions of dollars a year, from Trump Tower in Manhattan to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. As penalties James is seeking a quarter of a billion dollars and to bar Trump and his eldest sons from serving as an officer of any New York company.
The trial may also shed light on Trump’s fraught relationship with his bankers. Six current and former employees of Deutsche Bank AG, one of Trump’s biggest lenders before it cut ties after the January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol, are on the state’s witness list. Trump has rejected the claims and said the Democratic attorney general “targeted” him. On his Truth Social platform he declared he had “a great case based on phenomenal numbers that show a net worth billions of dollars more than she viciously & falsely claimed, very little debt, big cash, a powerful disclaimer clause, paid off loans, no defaults, ‘happy’ banks, great assets.”The trial doesn’t carry the threat of imprisonment as the four criminal cases against him do.
Engoron said of Trump’s triplex that “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.”Trump argues James can’t sue under New York law because the allegedly fraudulent asset valuations didn’t harm the public and because the “purported victims” are all “corporate titans fully capable of advancing their own considerable legal rights.