President Donald Trump's claims that Japanese car giant Toyota was going to set up factories "all over" the United States "to the tune of over $10 billion" have been thoroughly debunked, according to a Wednesday report in the Guardian.
A senior executive at Toyota – the world’s largest automaker – said that "no such explicit promise of investment at that level had been made."
The firm held talks with Japanese and American officials ahead of Trump’s visit and although Toyota does plan to invest and create some jobs in the U.S., they denied Trump's specific number.
As for where Trump got the $10 billion dollar figure from, the executive told reporters that it could have been from Trump's first term.
"During the first Trump administration, I think the figure was roughly around $10 billion, so while we didn’t say the same scale, we did explain that we’ll keep investing and providing employment as before,” Toyota executive Hiroyuki Ueda told reporters at the Japan Mobility Show in Tokyo. “So, probably because of that context, the figure of about $10 billion came up.”
However, Toyota never promised to invest that much this time, Ueda said.
Toyota “didn’t specifically say that we’ll invest $10 billion over the next few years”, Ueda said, adding that the topic of investment did not come up when Akio Toyoda, the firm’s chairman, spoke with Trump at a US embassy event on Tuesday.
Click here to read the Guardian's full report.