Former US president Donald Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr on Wednesday told a judge he was not involved in preparing financial statements for his father’s real-estate company that are at the center of New York state’s civil fraud trial.
“The accountants worked on it,” Donald Trump Jr testified in a Manhattan courtroom. “That’s what we paid them for.”
New York Attorney General Letitia James has accused Trump and his two eldest sons in a lawsuit of inflating asset values across the family’s real-estate empire by billions of dollars, reaping US$250 million in “illegal profits” from 2011 to 2021.
Photo: AFP
The former president has denied wrongdoing, though the judge in the case has already found him liable for fraud.
According to the state’s suit, Donald Trump Jr, 45, is “involved in all aspects of Trump Organization property development, from deal evaluation, analysis and pre-development planning to construction, branding, marketing, operations, sales and leasing.”
As a senior vice president, he oversees an extensive real-estate portfolio and serves as the sole trustee of the Donald J Trump Revocable Trust. He is a defendant in the case along with this father and his brother, Eric.
Under questioning from a lawyer for the state, Donald Trump Jr was shown a 2017 statement of financial condition for his father, which indicated that, as a trustee, he would have been responsible in the preparation of the document.
However, he disavowed any involvement, insisting the document was the responsibility of the Trump Organization accountants Mazars USA LLP.
“I wasn’t working on the document,” said Donald Trump Jr, who serves as an executive vice president at the company.
The accountants at Mazars “had an incredibly intimate knowledge and I relied upon them,” he said.
The document indicated that Mazars had prepared the figures based on information provided by trustees for the trust, where Donald Trump Jr was a trustee at the time.
“Did you work on this statement of financial condition?” asked Colleen Faherty, a lawyer for the state.
“I did not,” Donald Trump Jr said.
Faherty asked Donald Trump Jr if his brother had any authority over his work from 2011 to 2017.
“We were on similar planes, but we had our own silos,” Donald Trump Jr said.
He was expected to resume testimony yesterday, followed by Eric Trump. The former president is slated to take the stand on Monday.
TIT-FOR-TAT: The arrest of Filipinos that Manila said were in China as part of a scholarship program follows the Philippines’ detention of at least a dozen Chinese The Philippines yesterday expressed alarm over the arrest of three Filipinos in China on suspicion of espionage, saying they were ordinary citizens and the arrests could be retaliation for Manila’s crackdown against alleged Chinese spies. Chinese authorities arrested the Filipinos and accused them of working for the Philippine National Security Council to gather classified information on its military, the state-run China Daily reported earlier this week, citing state security officials. It said the three had confessed to the crime. The National Security Council disputed Beijing’s accusations, saying the three were former recipients of a government scholarship program created under an agreement between the
Sitting around a wrestling ring, churchgoers roared as local hero Billy O’Keeffe body-slammed a fighter named Disciple. Beneath stained-glass windows, they whooped and cheered as burly, tattooed wresters tumbled into the aisle during a six-man tag-team battle. This is Wrestling Church, which brings blood, sweat and tears — mostly sweat — to St Peter’s Anglican church in the northern England town of Shipley. It is the creation of Gareth Thompson, a charismatic 37-year-old who said he was saved by pro wrestling and Jesus — and wants others to have the same experience. The outsized characters and scripted morality battles of pro wrestling fit
SUSPICION: Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing returned to protests after attending a summit at which he promised to hold ‘free and fair’ elections, which critics derided as a sham The death toll from a major earthquake in Myanmar has risen to more than 3,300, state media said yesterday, as the UN aid chief made a renewed call for the world to help the disaster-struck nation. The quake on Friday last week flattened buildings and destroyed infrastructure across the country, resulting in 3,354 deaths and 4,508 people injured, with 220 others missing, new figures published by state media showed. More than one week after the disaster, many people in the country are still without shelter, either forced to sleep outdoors because their homes were destroyed or wary of further collapses. A UN estimate
Australia’s opposition party yesterday withdrew election promises to prevent public servants from working from home and to slash more than one in five federal public-sector jobs. Opposition leader Peter Dutton announced his conservative Liberal Party had dropped its pledge that public servants would be required to work in their offices five days a week except in exceptional circumstances. “I think we made a mistake in relation to this policy,” Dutton told Nine Network television. “I think it’s important that we say that and recognize it, and our intention was to make sure that where taxpayers are working hard and their money is
RSS