Trump CEO Allen Weisselberg surrenders to face charges

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The 73-year-old’s lawyer and the Trump Organization could not immediately be reached for comment. Mr. Trump has long attacked Mr. Vance’s investigation as a partisan “witch hunt.” Earlier this week, he described the fringe benefits his company offers employees “things that are standard practice throughout the American business community, and are in no way a crime.”

Now that he faces charges, Mr Weiselberg can still cooperate with prosecutors. If he eventually pleads guilty and cuts a deal, he could do great harm to Mr Trump, who for decades relied on his unwavering loyalty, once declaring with “100 per cent” certainty that Mr Wesselberg had not betrayed him.

The two began working closely together in the late 1970s, with Mr. Weiselberg setting aside nights and weekends to deal with the projects of Mr. Trump, the ambitious son of his boss, Fred Trump. Mr Weisselberg said in a 2015 affidavit that he had been helping with Mr Trump’s tax returns since at least the 1990s, when Mr Trump appointed him the organization’s chief financial officer.

Mr. Weisselberg has remained steadfastly loyal to the company even as his name surfaced during congressional and federal investigations into Mr. Trump. While Mr Weisselberg has never been the target of these investigations, he has long been a central focus of the attorney general’s investigation, which began in August 2018.

As prosecutors focused on the benefits he and his family received from Trump, they sifted through tens of thousands of dollars in private school tuition for one of Weisselberg’s grandchildren, a rent-free apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and rented Mercedes-Benz cars. Mr Weisselberg’s wife also received her own Mercedes.

Mr. Weisselberg was not the only company’s first CEO to receive similar perks. Until 2018, when the company managed to rein in the benefits, it provided for a number of employees with Mercedes-Benz.

These types of benefits are generally taxable, although there are exceptions, and tax rules can be ambiguous.

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