Trump hid over $70 million in losses on his D.C. hotel, House committee report alleges

The committee also revealed that Trump received an unreported and surprising loan modification from Deutsche Bank halfway into his presidency, one that potentially saved the then-president and his struggling company tens of millions of dollars.

Deutsche Bank’s U.S. subsidiary loaned Trump $170 million in 2015 to finance the renovation and operation of the hotel. Under the terms of that loan, Trump was supposed to begin paying down the principal in 2018.

But according to the committee’s findings, in 2018, “the terms of the loan were changed to allow the Trump Hotel to defer any principal payments on the loan by six years.”

It is unclear, the committee says, how the loan modification was negotiated, or by whom. The change to the loan terms was never publicly disclosed, according to Trump’s annual financial disclosures.

A Deutsche Bank spokesman pushed back.

“The Committee’s letter makes several inaccurate statements regarding Deutsche Bank and its loan agreement,” he said.

The new findings are in keeping with Trump’s decades long pattern of allegedly inflating his income, assets and net worth, while hiding his losses and liabilities.

That pattern is currently the subject of a probe by New York state authorities, who are investigating whether Trump’s company inflated the value of his properties on insurance forms, and undervalued them on tax returns. This could amount to insurance fraud.

The company is also facing a tax evasion case in New York that has already ensnared its top accountant, longtime Trump family employee Allen Weisselberg. In July, Weisselberg pleaded not guilty to a bevy of charges stemming from an alleged decades-long plot to hide compensation he received from the company.

Trump has denied any allegations of wrongdoing, instead accusing authorities of subjecting him to a partisan “witch hunt.”

Trump was recently removed from the Forbes magazine list of the 400 richest Americans, a list he had been named on for the past 25 years. The Covid-19 pandemic hurt the commercial real estate and hotel industries especially hard, costing Trump approximately $600 million in estimated net worth, Forbes determined.

Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/08/trump-hid-over-70-million-in-losses-on-dc-hotel-house-panel-alleges.html