Donald Trump's company to be sentenced for 15-year tax fraud
FORMER US president Donald Trump will learn on Friday (Jan 13) how the company that bears his name will be punished after being found guilty of scheming to defraud the tax authorities for 15 years.
A New York state judge will impose the sentence after jurors in Manhattan found two Trump Organization affiliates guilty of 17 criminal charges last month.
The sentencing comes three days after Justice Juan Merchan of the Manhattan criminal court ordered Allen Weisselberg – who had testified as the prosecution’s star witness – to jail for five months. Weisselberg had worked for Trump’s family for 50 years, and was the company’s former chief financial officer.
Trump’s company faces only a maximum US$1.6 million penalty, but it plans to appeal the sentence. No one else was charged in the case.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, which brought the case, is still conducting a criminal probe into Trump’s business practices.
Bill Black, a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law who specialises in white-collar crime, called the expected penalty a “rounding error” that offers “zero deterrence” to others, including Trump.
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“This is a farce,” he said. “No one will stop committing these kinds of crimes because of this sentence.”
The case has long been a thorn in the side of the Republican former president, who has called it part of a witch hunt by Democrats who dislike him and his politics.
Trump also faces a US$250 million civil lawsuit by New York State Attorney-General Letitia James accusing him and his adult children Donald Trump Jr, Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump of inflating his net worth, and also the value of his company’s assets, to save money on loans and insurance.
Bragg and James are Democrats, as is Bragg’s predecessor Cyrus Vance, who brought the criminal case. Trump is seeking the presidency in 2024, after losing his re-election bid in 2020.
At a four-week trial, prosecutors offered evidence that Trump’s company covered personal expenses such as rent and car leases for executives without reporting them as income. They also said that the company misreported Christmas bonuses as non-employee compensation.
Prosecutors said that Trump himself signed bonus cheques, as well as the lease on Weisselberg’s luxury Manhattan apartment. They also said that he signed cheques for private school tuition for Weisselberg’s grandchildren.
“The whole narrative that Donald Trump was blissfully ignorant is just not real,” Assistant District Attorney Joshua Steinglass told jurors in his closing argument.
Weisselberg’s testimony helped to convict the company, though he said that Trump was not part of the fraud scheme. He also refused to help Bragg in his broader investigation into Trump.
The Trump Organization had put Weisselberg on paid leave until they severed ties this week. His lawyer said that the split, announced on Tuesday, was amicable.
Weisselberg, 75, is serving his sentence in New York City’s notorious Rikers Island jail.
State law limits the penalties that Justice Merchan can impose on Trump’s company. A corporation can be fined up to US$250,000 for each tax-related count, and US$10,000 for each non-tax count.
Trump faces several other legal woes, including probes related to the Jan 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, his retention of classified documents after leaving the White House, and his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia. REUTERS
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