| | | By the way, Bill, in case you still think Trump's own fraudulent numbers didn't matter to the lenders:
Trump Paid Expert Almost $1 Million for Shoddy Testimony at Bank Fraud Trial (Daily Beast)
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In Bartov’s view, banks rely on their own assessments. No client applying for a loan is trusted anyway. People are expected to fudge a little. The opposite, he testified in court, would be preposterous.
“You have to believe Deutsche Bank... is not aware of every accounting textbook, every scientific paper says again and again and again: you cannot rely on the numbers as reported in the financial statement... you have to make your own independent analysis, come up with your own numbers,” Bartov said on Tuesday.
But that point quickly ran into three problems. First, Justice Arthur F. Engoron already determined in September before the trial ever started that Trump did indeed commit bank fraud by routinely faking the value of his properties. Second, AG Letitia James’ investigators keep asserting in court that it doesn’t even have to prove the banks were truly tricked, only that Trump broke the law by lying—an idea the judge keeps endorsing. And third, even Trump’s own star expert had to acknowledge that any lying by Trump didn’t exist in a vacuum.
That last point was made apparent as Bartov answered questions from Louis Solomon, the chief of enforcement at the AG's real estate finance bureau. Although Bartov kept insisting that the banks in no way relied on Trump’s fanciful numbers, his previous assessment said otherwise. The state lawyer pointed to Bartov’s own sworn expert statement in court filings, using a red underline to highlight places where the professor used particular language to hedge around Trump’s financial shenanigans.
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The Trumps’ pricey expert quickly ran into trouble, however, when the AG’s office pointed out that Deutsche Bank had a policy in place that would routinely cut down certain Trump assessments by half, a clean and simple calculation that vastly reduced the billionaire’s fantasy finances. So in 2014, when Trump reported a $3.8 billion value in real estate net equity, the bank’s “DB adjusted” value was half that, at $1.9 billion. It was the same across the board, year after year. As the bank officer Nicholas Haigh had previously testified at this trial, it was essentially an automatic adjustment for real estate assets.
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In other words, Deutsche Bank routinely cut the assessments made by clients by a half, so Trump tried to make up for it by exaggerating. His fraudulent numbers did indeed have an effect on what the bank ended up lending him.
And the extent by which Trump exaggerated far exceeded anything that reasonable people could have concluded with respect to the valuation of the properties, Judge Engoron already decided.
But hey, yOu'Re tHe lEgAl eXpErT, so maybe you can tell us in what world would be OK to completely lie about something in order to manipulate what you can get out of the other party.
Lie, cheat, steal, all to get everything you can out of it and claim no one was hurt.
Tenchusatsu |
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