When New York Attorney General Letitia James announced that she was filing a civil lawsuit against Donald Trump, his three eldest children, and the Trump Organization for fraud, one of the things she mentioned as an example of the alleged fraud committed involved the ex-president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
The Washington Post reports:
The lawsuit, filed in New York Supreme Court, is the result of a more than two-year investigation by James and names 23 properties in the Trump Organization portfolio, including his Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida, his Seven Springs estate in Westchester County, N.Y., and the D.C. hotel he leased from the federal government until he sold it in May.
“The inflated asset valuations in the Statements cannot be brushed aside or excused as merely the result of exaggeration or good faith estimation about which reasonable real estate professionals may differ,” it says.
Here’s how James explained the way Trump overvalued Mar-a-Lago:
And the suit says Trump valued his Mar-a-Lago club property in Palm Beach, Florida, on the false premise that it sat on unrestricted property and could be developed for residential use, even though he allegedly knew that asset was subject to a slew of tight restrictions.
Mar-a-Lago “generated less than $25 million in annual revenue,” James said. “It should have been valued at about $75 million, but it was valued at $739 million.”
But the real danger for Trump, his family, and his company is that James has a weapon at her disposal that would allow her to impose what’s know as the “corporate death penalty” in the Empire State, as was first reported by Business Insider last month:
In the coming months, James will be turning up the heat on the Trumps. And by the time she’s finished, the Trump Organization could be nothing but a bad memory.