Fascist Billionaire’s Operation Fleeced Taxpayers for Tens of Millions of Dollars
Scam Disguised Equity Investment as Loan, Exploiting Tax Loophole
Trump’s Negotiator Was Mob Figure and Convicted Felon Felix Sater
Trump Likely Committed Perjury by Claiming Under Oath He Could Not Recall His “Senior Adviser” Sater
“I’m the king of debt. I love debt.” —Trump, 2016 1
It’s not a loan – it’s really equity. I don’t think they would survive a challenge [by the IRS] —Howard Abrams, Professor of Tax Law, University of San Diego
Felix Sater
Photo shows Trump business associate Felix Sater. As …“man in the room” [For Bayrock Group, a smaller Trump satellite] on various Trump real estate dealings, the mogul chose “Felix Sater, a Russian-born businessman who spent a period in prison in the Nineties for stabbing a man with a broken margarita glass. He was then convicted of helping lead one of the biggest stock fraud heists of Wall Street of the era, involving New York mafia families.” Sater had an office in Trump Tower and business cards listing him as a “senior advisor to Donald Trump,” whom he represented in the 2007 Trump SoHo Hotel and Condominium project. 2
During this final phase of the 2016 presidential primary elections, all candidates have made public some part of their tax information – all, that is, except the fascist billionaire Donald Trump, who claims his usual special privilege while whining that the system treats him unfairly. Trump’s underworld handler Paul Manafort has now bluntly stated that Trump has no intention of making his tax returns public, allegedly because they are so complicated that the public would not understand them.3 Perhaps Trump’s fear is that the public WOULD understand his tax returns all too well. Many rich men have run for the presidency, and just about all of them in recent years have bowed to the imperative of financial transparency. All that Trump will tell the public is that he has paid some form of federal tax in some recent years. This is an insult to the intelligence of the American people.
The US television networks should now be clamoring in chorus for Trump to release these returns. His feeble excuse that he is being audited convinces no one at this point. But these US media corporations have focused instead on supporting Trump with free media coverage, which now must be approaching $3 billion in value.
Fortunately, there are other media in the world. Ruth Sherlock, Edward Malnick, and Claire Newell of the London Daily Telegraph have just published a very revealing profile of the shenanigans that went on in 2007 around the Trump Soho Hotel and Condominium project.
From their excellent research, we can already conclude that Trump’s business operation aimed at dodging tens of millions of dollars in federal taxes – lost taxes that would have to be made up by increasing the burden on the middle class, who often pay withholding taxes and cannot afford the offshore tax havens, expensive lawyers and accountants used by predatory plutocrats like Trump.
At the heart of this scam was a slick trick to transform the purchase of a $50 million ownership stake in Trump Soho into a loan. This maneuver, which is seen by many tax experts as simply illegal, shows us what Trump means when he says that he loves debt. The US tax code notoriously rewards debt and punishes equity, and Trump has fully embraced crushing debt, relieved by periodic write-downs at the expense of others, as his way of life.
In addition, Trump’s agent in this entire matter turns out to be one Felix Sater of Bayrock Group, a shadowy mob figure who represented him in the dodgy and convoluted negotiations. Trump is currently so anxious to put distance between himself and Sater that he may have lied under oath by vehemently insisting that he could not recall who Sater is.
Thus, the Daily Telegraph revelations show Trump to be a tax cheater and possible perjurer. This may not be enough to wake up his crazed petty bourgeois followers, but allegations of this type cannot be helping Trump among tens of millions of normal, middle-class American voters who are also honest taxpayers.
The Daily Telegraph report is based on three months of research and interviews and has benefited from the advice of experts on US and New York State tax law. The findings are summed up as follows:
In 2007, “US presidential hopeful Donald Trump signed off on a controversial business deal that was designed to deprive the American government of tens of millions of dollars in tax, the Telegraph can disclose. The billionaire approved a $50 million investment in a company – only for the deal to be rewritten several weeks later as a ‘loan’. Experts say that the effect of this move was to skirt vast tax liabilities, and court papers seen by the Telegraphallege that the deal amounted to fraud. Independent tax accountants and lawyers said that the documents Mr. Trump signed – copies of which were obtained by this newspaper as part of a three-month investigation – contained “red flags” indicating the deal was irregular.” 4
The Trump Soho operation reached all the way to Iceland, which was in 2007 one of the focal points of the world derivatives-assisted real estate bubble. Anti-fascist investigative journalists in Reykjavík will no doubt be interested in tracking down some of these details:
“The allegations centre on Mr. Trump’s business alliance with Bayrock Group, the property company that was building Trump SoHo, the mogul’s prized New York building – as well as two other projects to which he had licensed his name. In 2007 Bayrock struck a deal with FL Group, an Icelandic company that had agreed to invest $50 million in four of Bayrock’s subsidiary partnerships. However, the deal was later relabelled as a loan. In New York, the sale of a stake in a partnership would make the existing partners liable to pay more than 40 per cent in tax on their ‘gain’, based on the highest tax rate. However, if the investment is classified as a loan no tax would be payable. Former employees of Bayrock have alleged in a case against the company that the deal was intended to fraudulently evade some $20 million in tax through a disguised sale of partnership interests. They also claim the participants mislabelled the sale as a loan in order to avoid paying a further estimated $80 million taxes on the projected profits from the real estate.”5
Disguising the purchase of equity and ownership in the company by masking the transaction as a loan is a well-known tax dodge, and tax officials should have no difficulty in recognizing this state of affairs. The allegations made by the British researchers are corroborated by ‘Howard Abrams, professor of law and director of tax at the University of San Diego, [who] said: “Converting the original equity into debt improved their tax position dramatically. However they have changed the labels, but they didn’t really change the economics at all. “It’s not a loan – it’s really equity. I don’t think they would survive a challenge [by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)].’”
Trump’s execrable judgment in associating with a known criminal like Felix Sater underlines once again that he is totally unfit for the US presidency. Richard Nixon, from whose circles so much of the Trump team is drawn, showed the same kind of terrible judgment through his close association with the sleazy banker Charles “Bebe” Rebozo, who became known as “Nixon’s bagman.” The press may soon be referring to Sater as “Trump’s bagman.” According to the Daily Telegraph:
‘At the same time, however, intense final negotiations were ongoing between Bayrock and FL. Their representatives had met in London, where Bayrock’s “man in the room” was “Felix Sater, a Russian-born businessman who spent a period in prison in the Nineties for stabbing a man with a broken margarita glass. He was then convicted of helping lead one of the biggest stock fraud heists of Wall Street of the era, involving New York mafia families.” Sater had an office in Trump Tower and business cards listing him as a “senior advisor to Donald Trump,” whom he represented in the 2007 Trump SoHo Hotel and Condominium project.’
Trump claims to have the “world’s greatest memory,” although knowledgeable observers are beginning to wonder whether he has been overtaken by Alzheimer’s disease.5 Whether Trump’s memory is good or bad, it is in any case highly selective and seems to block out memories which might be detrimental to him. As ABC News recently reported:
‘Though he touts his outstanding memory, when Donald Trump was asked under oath about his dealings with a twice-convicted Russian émigré who served prison time and had documented mafia connections, the real estate mogul was at a loss – Even though the man, Felix Sater, had played a role in a number of high-profile Trump-branded projects across the country. “If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like,” Trump testified in a video deposition for a civil lawsuit two years ago.’6
Alzheimer’s or perjury? In either case, Trump is disqualified from being president of the United States. Self-respecting Americans should join in demanding that a person who is seeking to get control of the thermonuclear launch codes turn over his complete tax returns of the last 10 years, as some of the candidates have already done. We would also need to examine the legality of whether Trump could continue to speculate from inside the Oval Office, and whether privileged government intelligence reports used for speculative purposes by him would constitute illegal insider trading. America needs to stop Trump long before any of this can become reality.
- http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2016/05/04/i-love-debt-trump-says-he-is-…
- Ruth Sherlock, Edward Malnick, and Claire Newell, “Donald Trump signed off deal designed to deprive US of tens of millions of dollars in tax,”London Daily Telegraph, May 25, 2016 athttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/25/exclusive-donald-trump-signed…
- http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/ testing testing26/politics/paul-manafort-donald-trump-tax-returns/
- Sherlock, Malnick, and Newell, Daily Telegraph, May 25, 2016
- http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/amid-latest-controversy-tr…
- http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/memory-lapse-trump-seeks-distance-advisor…
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http://tarpley.net/london-daily-telegraph-reveals-sleazy-dons-massive-trump-soho-tax-fraud/