Proven in court of law: not mere accusation from partisan goons
Long before Donald J. Trump’s company was accused of plotting detours around the tax code to compensate its chief financial officer with carpeting, televisions and car leases, there were the $16,135 boilers.
The boilers were bought for that amount by Mr. Trump’s father, Fred, in the 1990s for his numerous apartment buildings. But in a bit of financial alchemy that embodied the family ethos of paying as little tax as possible, the elder Mr. Trump used inflated invoices to pay the bill and the extra money was skimmed off for his children — all to avoid gift and inheritance taxes.
Echoes of the earlier scheme could be found in
the indictment on Thursday of the Trump Organization and Allen H. Weisselberg, its chief financial officer, who first went to work for Fred Trump in the 1970s. While the amount of tax-free benefits that
Mr. Weisselberg reportedly received is significant — $1.76 million over 15 years — the way the company went about doling them out is strikingly small-bore and incremental.
In fact,
the first criminal case against the former president’s company features no grand schemes to launder money through Russia, hide millions offshore or commit other offenses commensurate with a self-described global business empire headquartered in a Fifth Avenue skyscraper. Rather, the details of the charges brought by a Manhattan grand jury have a rather low-rent feel that one might associate with a scrappy real-estate operation born in Brooklyn and Queens.
Which, of course, it is.
The
Trump Organization, for all the puffery of its leader, has always been essentially a family business, tightly controlled by Mr. Trump and a small number of relatives and trusted associates, including Mr. Weisselberg. Although the company has about 3,500 employees worldwide, most are lower-tier workers at golf resorts and hotels and only 122 made $100,000 or more in 2018, according to tax records for Mr. Trump and his businesses obtained by The New York Times.
The tax records, which The Times
reported on last year, also reveal a deep commitment to green-eyeshades maneuvering to winnow taxes to a minimum. Hundreds of millions of dollars in deductions for business expenses ran the gamut, from $6 for food in Uruguay and $10 for using a telephone in Panama to $13.7 million for “sales and marketing” in Las Vegas.
The first criminal prosecution involving the former president’s business hearkens back to Fred Trump’s $16,135 purchase of boilers in the 1990s.
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