Trump — who is battered by civil judgments — will now no longer publicize his net worth

27 July 2024

For nearly 20 years, former President Donald Trump has made an annual tradition of sending out a statement of his net worth, primarily in the hopes of being included in the Forbes 400 list.

Now, the ex-president is keeping his net worth private, according to a new report by Business Insider. The publication learned that Trump's court-appointed financial monitor, retired judge Barbara Jones, wrote in a recent footnote of her latest report on the Trump Organization that the real estate mogul will no longer send out statements publicizing his net worth — something he's done since 2004.

"Based on discussions with the Trump Organization, my understanding is that the Trump Organization does not intend to develop any estimations of value for any entity, the Trump Organization as a whole, or the guarantors' collateral," Jones' footnote read.

In the event that a lender needs to know the value of the Trump Organization's real estate portfolio, the company is now reportedly inviting outside parties to simply hire their own appraiser to determine the value of a given asset. The ex-president's company has also said it would hire an independent property appraiser to gauge the worth of a building in the event of an inquiry.

The statements, which typically numbered between 20 and 30 pages, were often sent out to "dazzle" the media — most notably Forbes, in the hopes of being included on the publication's annual list of America's 400 wealthiest billionaires. Forbes notably excluded Trump from its 2023 billionaires list, which was published several months before Judge Arthur Engoron handed down his $454 million civil fraud judgment. Forbes wrote last October that Trump's "social media platform and commercial real estate holdings are sputtering."

In 2011, Trump sent one such statement to a Deutsche Bank executive, and in the cover letter, wrote: "Hopefully, you will be impressed!" He was eventually found to have artificially inflated his net worth by roughly $2.7 billion.

The fraud trial that lasted from late 2023 to early 2024 found that while he was a New York real estate developer, Trump had a deliberate pattern of lying about his net worth in order to obtain favorable insurance premiums, collateralize his buildings to get bigger and better loans and to garner more favorable tax breaks. Judge Engoron wrote that the level of fraud Trump perpetrated had the ability to "leap off the page and shock the conscience."

Engoron ruled before the trial even began that the former president was guilty of fraud. Trump appealed that decision only for a New York appeals court to uphold Engoron's initial ruling. The trial itself was only to determine how much Trump owed the Empire State in penalties.

Approximately six months before his civil fraud trial started, Trump told New York Attorney General Letitia James in a deposition that his company had "a lot of cash."

"When we testify," he added, "we're going to have numbers that are going to knock your socks off."

In addition to the hundreds of millions of dollars he still owes the State of New York, Trump is also on the hook for an $83.3 million judgment for defaming writer E. Jean Carroll. And a separate trial in 2023 found Trump liable for sexual abuse, and a judge ordered him to pay Carroll $5 million.

Click here to read Business Insider's report in its enitrety (subscription required).

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