Donald Trump, the former US president, has been sued for fraud along with three of his children by New York Attorney General Letitia James. The lawsuit accuses the 76-year-old Republican politician and his family of “numerous acts of fraud and misrepresentations”.
New York AG Letitia James alleged in the civil lawsuit filed at the State Supreme Court in Manhattan, that Donald Trump inflated his net worth by several billion dollars. She has accused the former president of cheating lenders with misleading information on his finances.
“With the help of his children and senior executives at the Trump Organization, Donald Trump falsely inflated his net worth by billions of dollars to unjustly enrich himself and cheat the system,” James said in a statement.
The lawsuit says that Trump used Allan Weisselberg, an executive at the Trump Organisation, to persuade banks to lend money to his company on more favourable terms than legally deserved.
“Mr. Trump made known through Mr. Weisselberg that he wanted his net worth on the Statements to increase — a desire Mr. Weisselberg and others carried out year after year in their fraudulent preparation of the Statements,” the lawsuit alleged.
In the lawsuit, AG James claims that Trump’s Florida resort Mar-a-Lago, which was raided by the FBI earlier, was overvalued by Trump at $739 million. The actual value of the resort, according to the lawsuit, is $75 million.
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James, who was called a “racist” by Trump earlier, claimed that Trump was able to inflate the value of his resort on the “false premise” that it was an unrestricted property that can be developed for residential use. On the contrary, she said in the lawsuit, that Trump had signed deeds donating his residential development rights.
Donald Trump and Letitia James are at a crossroads with each other after Allen Weisselberg pleaded guilty to running a years-long tax-evasion scheme for the Trump Organisations.
