The OAG has determined that the Statements of Financial Condition described Mr. Trump’s (or the Trustees of the Revocable Trust’s) valuation process in broad terms and in ways which were often inaccurate or misleading when compared with the supporting data and documentation that the Trump Organization submitted to its accounting firm. Among other things, the statements:
- Misstated objective facts, like the size of Mr. Trump’s Trump Tower penthouse;
- Miscategorized assets outside Mr. Trump’s or the Trump Organization’s control as “cash,” thereby overstating his liquidity;
- Misstated the process by which Mr. Trump or his associates reached valuations, including deviations from generally accepted accounting principles in ways that the statements did not disclose;
- Failed to use fundamental techniques of valuation, like discounting future revenues and expenses to their present value, or choosing as “comparables” only similar properties in order to impute valuations from public sales data;
- Misstated the purported involvement of “outside professionals” in reaching the valuations; and
- Failed to advise that certain valuation amounts were inflated by an undisclosed amount for brand value.
All of the examples described below appeared on official Statements of Financial Condition for Donald J. Trump for a number of years and were used to obtain loans or otherwise state the net worth of Mr. Trump and the Trump Organization.
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