Donald Trump’s company will be sentenced to 15-year tax fraud

[ad_1]

NEW YORK, Jan 13 (Reuters) – Donald Trump will learn on Friday how the company bearing the former US president’s name will be punished after being found guilty of a 15-year scheme to defraud tax authorities.

A New York state judge will impose the sentence after a Manhattan jury found two Trump Organization affiliates guilty of 17 criminal charges last month.

The sentence came three days after Manhattan criminal court Justice Juan Merchan ordered Allen Weisselberg, who worked for the Trump family for half a century and was the company’s former chief financial officer, to serve five months in prison after he testified as the prosecution’s star witness. .

Trump’s company faces only a maximum $1.6 million penalty, but it has said it plans to appeal. No one else has been charged or faces jail time in the case.

The office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, which brought the case, is still conducting a criminal investigation into Trump’s business practices.

Bill Black, a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law who specializes in white-collar crime, called the expected punishment a “rounding error” that offers “zero deterrence” to others, including Trump.

“It’s a farce,” he said. “No one will stop committing these types of crimes because of this sentence.”

The case has long been a thorn in the side of the former Republican president, who has called it part of a witch hunt by Democrats who dislike him and his politics.

Trump also faces a $250 million civil lawsuit by state Attorney General Letitia James accusing him and his grown children Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump of growing his net worth and the value of his company’s assets to save money on loans and insurance.

Bragg and James were Democrats, as was Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance, who brought the criminal charges. Trump is seeking the presidency in 2024, after losing his re-election bid in 2020.

During the four-week trial, prosecutors offered evidence that Trump’s company covered personal expenses such as rent and car rentals for executives without reporting them as income, and pretended that Christmas bonuses are non-employee compensation.

Trump himself signed the bonus checks, prosecutors said, as well as the rent on Weisselberg’s luxury Manhattan apartment and private school tuition for the CFO’s grandchildren.

“The whole narrative that Donald Trump is clueless is not true,” Assistant District Attorney Joshua Steinglass told jurors in his closing argument.

Weisselberg’s testimony helped convict the company, even though he said Trump was not part of the fraud scheme. He also refused to help Bragg in his broader investigation of Trump.

The Trump Organization placed Weisselberg on paid leave until their relationship was severed this week. His lawyer said the split, announced Tuesday, was amicable.

Weisselberg, 75, is serving his sentence at New York City’s notorious Rikers Island jail.

State law limits the penalties Justice Merchan can impose on Trump’s company. A corporation can be fined up to $250,000 for each tax-related count and $10,000 for each non-tax count.

Trump faces several other legal problems, including investigations related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, his retention of classified documents after leaving the White House, and effort to reverse his 2020 election loss in Georgia.

Reporting by Karen Freifeld and Jonathan Stempel; editing by Jonathan Oatis

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

[ad_2]