Former US president Donald Trump’s eponymous company together with a related entity and a long-time top finance executive have been charged with running a scheme to defraud the federal Internal Revenue Service and New York state and New York City tax authorities for 15 years starting 2005.
The Trump Organization, Trump Payroll Corporation, an entity that process payments and compensations to employees of the company and chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg were charged on Thursday with 15 felony counts including criminal tax fraud, grand larceny and falsifying business records.
Weisselberg is personally accused of evading taxes on $1.7 million in indirect income he received from the Trump Organization for a rented accommodation where he has lived for years, private school tuitions for members of his family, lease on two Mercedes Benz cars for himself and his wife.
“To put it bluntly, this was a sweeping and audacious illegal payments scheme,” Carey Dunne, general counsel for the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R Vance, Jr, said during an arraignment in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan, according to a report in the New York Times.
Weisselberg was marched to court in handcuffs. He was released but his lawyers were made to surrender his passport as prosecutors argued he is a flight risk given his resources.
Former president Trump dismissed the charges as a “political witch hunt by the radical left Democrats” and said the New York prosecutors, who are both Democrats, “now taking over the assignment, continues”. And sought to portray it as something that “dividing our country like never before”!
Though Trump was not personally charged nor any of his children who have been involved in the running of the organisation, he was clearly bothered by the indictment of the company which made him famous around the world and which he liked to tout as a huge success, which, he had vowed to replicate as president.
“If the name of the company was something else, I don’t think these charges would have been brought,” said Alan Futerfas, a Trump Organization attorney.
The White House did not comment directly on the indictment. Deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters aboard Air Force One President Joe Biden “has made clear that it’s long past due for the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share”.
The Thursday indictment came after two years of investigation that started with the conviction of Micheal Cohen, Trump’s once-time lawyer and fixer for making hush-money payments to women who had claimed to have had relations with Trump. Cohen had also said in a congressional testimony that the Trump Organization inflated the value of its assets when seeking bank loans and undervalued them for taxation purposes.
Manhattan attorney had tried to pressure Weisselberg, who is considered the most important figure in the Trump Organization outside the Trump family, to cooperate and flip on the former president. He withstood the pressure, but experts believe the threat of a long prison sentence can make him change his mind.
Weisselberg has pleaded not guilty. “He will fight these charges in court,” his lawyers, Mary E Mulligan and Bryan C Skarlatos, said.
