NEW YORK — Donald Trump could be at risk of losing some of his prized properties if he can’t pay his staggering New York civil fraud penalty. With interest, he owes the state nearly $454 million — and the amount is going up $87,502 each day until he pays.
New York Attorney General Letitia James told ABC News on Tuesday that she will seek to seize some of the former president’s assets if he’s unable to cover the bill from Judge Arthur Engoron’s Feb. 16 ruling.
Engoron concluded that Trump lied for years about his wealth as he built the real estate empire that vaulted him to stardom and the White House. Trump denies wrongdoing and has vowed to appeal.
“If he does not have funds to pay off the judgment, then we will seek judgment enforcement mechanisms in court, and we will ask the judge to seize his assets,” James, a Democrat, said in an interview with ABC reporter Aaron Katersky.
Trump’s ability to pay his mounting legal debts is increasingly murky after back-to-back courtroom losses. In January, a jury ordered him to pay $83.3 million for defaming writer E. Jean Carroll.
Trump claimed last year that he has about $400 million in cash — reserves that would get eaten up by his court penalties. The rest of his net worth, which he says is several billion dollars, is tied up in golf courses, skyscrapers and other properties, along with investments and other holdings.
But don’t expect James to try to grab the keys to Trump Tower or Mar-a-Lago immediately. Trump’s promised appeal is likely to halt collection of his penalty while the process plays out.
Here’s a look at where things stand in the wake of Trump’s costly verdict.
COULD THE STATE REALLY SEIZE TRUMP’S ASSETS?
Yes. If Trump isn’t able to pay, the state “could levy and sell his assets, lien his real property, and garnish anyone who owes him money,” Syracuse University Law Professor Gregory Germain said.
Seizing assets is a common legal tactic when a defendant can’t access enough cash to pay a civil penalty. In a famous example, O.J. Simpson’s Heisman Trophy was seized and sold at auction in 1999 to cover part of a $33.5 million wrongful death judgment against him.
Trump could avoid losing assets to seizure if he has enough cash — or is able to free up enough cash — to pay his penalty and mounting interest.
How much he has isn’t clear because most information about Trump’s finances comes from Trump himself via his government disclosures and the annual financial statements that Engoron has deemed fraudulent.
Trump reported having about $294 million in cash or cash equivalents on his most recent annual financial statement for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2021.
After that, according to state lawyers, he added about $186.8 million from selling the lease on his Washington hotel in May 2022 and the rights to manage a New York City golf course in June 2023. Part of Trump’s penalty requires that he give those proceeds to the state, plus interest.
Engoron’s decision last week spared Trump’s real estate empire from what the Republican front-runner deemed the “corporate death penalty,” reversing a prior ruling and opting to leave his company in business, albeit with severe restrictions including oversight from a court-appointed monitor.
James didn’t specify to ABC which of Trump’s assets the state might want to seize, though she noted that her office happens to be right across the street from a Trump-owned office building in Lower Manhattan that was the subject of some of the fraud allegations in her lawsuit.
“We are prepared to make sure that the judgment is paid to New Yorkers,” James told ABC. “And yes, I look at 40 Wall Street each and every day.”
HOW WILL AN APPEAL AFFECT TRUMP’S PENALTY?
With Trump promising to appeal, it’s unlikely he’ll have to pay the penalty — or face the prospect of having some of his assets seized — for a while. If he wins, he might not have to pay anything.
Under state law, Trump will receive an automatic stay if he puts up money, assets or an appeal bond covering the amount he owes. A stay is a legal mechanism halting enforcement of a court decision while the appeals process plays out.
“Even if we choose to appeal this – which we will – we have to post the bond, which is the full amount and some, and we will be prepared to do that,” Trump lawyer Alina Habba told Fox News on Monday.
Trump’s lawyers can also ask the appeals court to grant a stay without obtaining a bond or with a bond for a lower amount.
In his Georgia election interference criminal case, Trump paid $20,000 — or 10% — for a $200,000 release bond. After losing at a first trial involving Carroll last year, Trump put $5.55 million in escrow to cover the cost of the judgment while he appeals. He has said he would appeal the $83.3 million January verdict but has yet to do so.
“If he can’t post a bond or meet the appellate division’s bonding requirements, then I would expect him to file bankruptcy to take advantage of the automatic stay on collection,” Germain said. “But that’s a couple of chess moves away, so we will just have to see what happens.”
Trump’s vow to appeal all but assures the legal fight over his business practices will persist into the thick of the presidential primary season as he tries to clinch the Republican nomination in his quest to retake the White House.
The appeal is also likely to overlap with his criminal trial next month in his New York hush-money case, the first of his four criminal cases to go to trial.
Trump can’t appeal yet because the clerk’s office at Engoron’s courthouse must first file paperwork to make the verdict official. Once that happens, Trump will have 30 days to appeal and get the penalty stayed, or pay up. Trump’s lawyers wrangled Wednesday with state lawyers and the judge over what that paperwork should say. Trump lawyer Cliff Robert told Engoron in a letter late Wednesday that he wants enforcement of the penalty delayed 30 days “to allow for an orderly post-Judgment process, particularly given the magnitude of Judgment.”
DOES TRUMP REALLY OWE $87,502 A DAY IN INTEREST?
With each passing day, Trump owes an additional $87,502 in interest on his civil fraud penalty. By Thursday, that’ll be an extra $525,000 since the decision was issued on Feb. 16. The interest will continue to accrue even while he appeals. Barring court intervention or an earlier resolution, his bill will soar to a half-billion dollars by August 2025.
Trump’s underlying penalty is $355 million, the equivalent of what the judge said were “ill-gotten gains” from savings on lower loan interest and windfall profits from development deals he wouldn’t have been able to make if he’d been honest about his wealth.
Under state law, he is being charged interest on that amount at an annual rate of 9%.
As of Wednesday, Trump owed just over $99 million in interest, bringing his total to just under $454 million — that’s $453,981,779 to be exact, according to the Associated Press’ calculations. Trump’s interest will keep accruing until Trump pays. Trump owes the money individually and as the owner of corporate entities that were named as defendants in James’ lawsuit.
Engoron said the interest Trump owes on about half of the total penalty amount — pertaining to loan savings — can be calculated from the start of James’ investigation in March 2019. Interest on the remaining amount — which pertains to the sale of Trump’s Washington hotel and Bronx golf course rights — can be calculated starting in May 2022 or June 2023.
In all, Engoron ordered Trump and his co-defendants to pay $363.9 million in penalties, or about $464.3 million with interest. The total bill increases by $89,729 per day, according to AP’s calculations.
Trump’s sons, Eric and Donald Jr., must each pay about $4.7 million, including interest, to the state for their shares of the Washington hotel sales. Weisselberg was ordered to pay $1 million — for half of the $2 million severance he’s receiving — plus about $100,000 in interest.
Until they pay, Weisselberg is on the hook for another $247 per day, while Trump’s sons each owe an extra $990 per day, according to AP’s calculations.
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Former President Donald Trump’s $83.3 million punishment for defaming E. Jean Carroll may not have hurt him in the polls, but it has put a spotlight on how much money the Republican front-runner has and how much more he may lose this week when a judgment is expected in the civil fraud case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James.
James has asked that Trump and his family be banned from doing business in New York and be forced to pay $370 million in ill-gotten gains after State Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron ruled last year that Trump had committed fraud in sending 11 years of inflated estimates of his net worth to Deutsche Bank and others. The inflated estimates helped Trump get lower interest rates.
In addition to the $83.3 million a New York jury ordered Trump to pay Carroll on Friday, as well as the $370 million the former president is looking at in his fraud trial, Engornon may go a step further and order Trump to be stripped of control over his companies, which includes his famous Fifth Avenue headquarters. He could also have his businesses dissolved.
While that won’t bankrupt Trump, it would arguably make a sizable dent in his wallet and pose a financial threat that Trump hasn’t faced in decades.
“This is basically a death penalty for a business,” Columbia University law professor Eric Talley said. “Is he getting his just desserts because of the fraud or because people don’t like him?”
A New York Times review of Trump’s financial records and interviews with those closest to him show that an unfavorable ruling may force him to sell various assets to stay afloat.
“The enterprise that is Trump isn’t going to be taken down by a bunch of criminal cases,” Steven M. Cohen, a former federal prosecutor and top official in the attorney general’s office who now teaches corporation law at New York Law School, said. “The enterprise that is Trump is going to be picked apart by these civil cases, and at some point, there is a risk of collapse.”
When contacted by reporters, Trump spokesman Steven Cheung did not specify how Trump plans to pay for the penalties but reiterated Trump had built a “tremendously successful, unparalleled business” before being elected to the White House.
On Sunday, Trump took to social media to attack James’s claims he had inflated his net worth multiple times over.
“I AM WORTH MUCH MORE THAN THE NUMBERS SHOWN ON MY FINANCIAL STATEMENTS,” he wrote.
Trump has been using money from a political action committee to pay for the bulk of his legal fees in the criminal cases against him, and even though some campaign finance experts say he could use it to help fund Carroll’s $83.3 million civil judgment, it would only cover a fraction of it.
He’ll likely have to open up his wallet for the rest.
In a deposition last year for the civil fraud case, Trump stated he had $400 million in cash available, though that has not been independently verified. His family business, because it is privately held, does not have to file public reports on its fiscal health with regulators.
When it comes to the fraud trial, he may have to sell a significant chunk of his portfolio or other assets, the New York Times reported.
The paper pointed to a memo prepared by Trump’s longtime CFO Allen Weisselberg when Trump entered the White House. In it, Weisselberg showed the Trump Organization had only $60 million in cash, which included $26 million that was off limits because it was tied up in a partnership. While Trump was in office, company stats shown to lenders revealed he had $75 million to $93 million in cash and “cash equivalents.”
Since then, the company has sold some assets, including a lease he controlled at his hotel in Washington, as well as the operating license at his golf club in the Bronx. The Trump Organization also inked new deals with foreign partners, including a Saudi-backed golf venture and a Saudi-based real estate company.
It is unclear what his company has done with that money, whether it is in a bank account, invested in the stock market, or was used to fund some of Trump’s other businesses, which have suffered chronic losses.
Despite the multimillion-dollar judgment Trump is facing for the fraud allegations, the judge could also order the former president’s real estate empire “dissolved.” If that happens, Trump will join a short list of those who have been slapped with the ultimate punishment for violating New York’s anti-fraud law.
The Associated Press did a deep dive into nearly 70 years of civil cases that revealed the harsh penalty has been imposed only a dozen times. If Trump’s empire is shut down, it would be the only large company that has been forced to dissolve without showing obvious victims and major losses.
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In addition to the civil suits, Trump has been charged with 91 criminal offenses in four criminal prosecutions.
He has denied wrongdoing across the board.
IT looked like the window of any other student letting agency.
But the houses and flats for rent in businessman Jeremy Southgate’s firm were fake images and pictures cut from magazines.
The modest agency was the front for a multi-million pound cannabis empire, which the trained solicitor ran with the help of Albanians smuggled into Britain in the back of trucks.
One of Britain’s most brazen criminals, Southgate was so cocky that he got government grants to insulate houses where foreign ‘gardeners’ looked after his cannabis farms.
He managed to get £100,000 worth of Covid loans to help keep his dummy business open during the pandemic.
Southgate, 63, also created ghost tenants to cover council tax bills despite raking in as much as £11.4million a year from his drugs enterprise.
He was so confident he’d never be caught that he stole electricity from dozens of neighbours – and once sent in a team to dig up a road to bypass a meter.
Cops in Hull who caught up with Southgate – whose astonishing double life is more reminiscent of a character from the drug-fuelled TV drama Breaking Bad – labelled him “arrogant and greedy”.
DC Karen Smith, who arrested him, said: “He was a very wealthy man who owned 72 properties outright, a boat and assets including a nursing home.
“None of this was done for need, but for greed.
“I’ve never met anyone quite like Southgate. In interviews he was evasive, arrogant and wouldn’t answer questions, often going off on tangents.
“This was a major drugs operation and the cannabis would have been disseminated into kilos and distributed nationally.”
Stashed thousands on boat
The story of Southgate’s illicit empire comes as new figures laid bare the drug crisis gripping the nation.
A record 69 tons of cannabis were seized last year – equivalent to a street value of £2billion.
Illustrating the sheer amount of money drug lords can turn over, cops found more than £50,000 in cash on a £140,000 boat Southgate owned called Billy Blue on Hull’s marina.
They also found £324,000 in notes hidden under a bed in the house where his girlfriend lived – and discovered Southgate had just banked £125,000.
He even owned a dilapidated hotel called The Pines in the city where police found £307,000 worth of cannabis growing in several rooms.
Twelve Albanians caught growing, distributing and selling Southgate’s cannabis have since been deported – but only after vain attempts to remain in the UK.
They claimed to be living in fear after being trafficked into the UK but police revealed they had been free to visit prostitutes, while one went on holiday to Milan.
DC Smith, of Humberside Police, said: “They told me they had willingly come into the UK, smuggled into the country in trucks.
“They then tried to claim they were victims of slavery but I was able to prove they had voluntarily made their way into Britain and were here willingly.
“They were drinking Hennessy on Hull marina, using the services of prostitutes, driving cars and going about their business. One even took a holiday to Milan so they were hardly locked into modern day slavery.
“We don’t want to discourage any genuine victims from reporting, but in this case these men were trying to manipulate the system.”
Detectives launched Operation Swale following a 2021 drugs bust in a house in Hull where a receipt for extension leads, galvanised steel, electrical tape and plug sockets was found – items used to set up cannabis farms.
When officers checked CCTV at the hardware store where the goods were bought, they discovered Albanian cousins Dardan Mrishaj and Evris Mirshaj travelling in and out of Hull from their homes in Peterborough.
Cops started trailing the pair who were meeting with Southgate and other associates, sitting outside coffee shops for ‘daily briefings’ after the first Covid lockdown in the summer of 2021.
Estate agents fraud
It wasn’t long before detectives realised Southgate’s letting agency, called Anderson Estates, was a total fraud. It was being run by another criminal called Florjan Kasaj, 41, who would occasionally open it.
He told police he was never paid by Southgate and was helping people with universal credit and asylum claims.
But Kasaj was really managing Southgate’s properties and instructing the cousins to build cannabis farms.
The now-deported team of illegal Albanians were hired to look after the plants, which made the gang up to £2.4million each crop.
But the cash wasn’t enough for Southgate, who applied for government grants to insulate his run-down properties and received £100,000 in fraudulent Covid loans to run his property business, called Amazing Lets, and a care home he owned in East Riding.
It emerged in court that he deliberately bought houses with poor energy ratings to apply for grants.
Cannabis seizures hit record high
BORDER cops seized 69 tonnes of marijuana last year – the highest amount ever.
The extent of Britain’s drug epidemic was laid bare after the Home Office also revealed that 3.3 tonnes of cocaine was blocked from coming into the UK.
The amount of weed seized by police and Border force officers doubled year-on-year from 35 tonnes in 2022.
Around a third of people in England and Wales aged between 16 and 59 have admitted to using cannabis at least one point in their lives, according to Statistica.
Authorities discovered 92 tonnes of illegal drugs in total – the largest amount for 18 years.
It’s a crime to possess, grow, distribute or sell cannabis and being caught comes with a maximum sentence of five years in prison, an unlimited fine, or both.
Being convicted of producing and supplying the Class B drug carries a jail term of up to 14 years.
Police can issue a warning or on-the-spot fine if you’re caught with small amounts – generally less than one ounce.
Many forces take a relaxed view to personal use but prosecution rates vary across the country. Durham Police say they will no longer target recreational users while Cornwall and Devon have a prosecution rate of 15 per cent.
Cannabis products said to aid sleep or relaxation can be bought over the counter but they do not contain the part of the plant that makes you high, THC.
Doctors can prescribe medical cannabis, with higher amounts of cannabidiol for sufferers of epilepsy, multiple sclerosis and cancer patients sick with chemotherapy.
Police searched 25 of Southgate’s property and found cannabis in 19.
They also discovered fake ID papers for unemployed tenants who never existed so the local authority would foot the bill for council tax.
Incredibly, he sent a team of ‘workmen’ to one property to drill into the road outside and bypass the electricity supply, before laying the tarmac back down.
Southgate trained as a solicitor in 1994 but found himself on the other side of the legal fence when was convicted at Hull Crown Court earlier this month.
He was found guilty of two counts to produce Class B drugs, money laundering and two counts of fraud by false representation.
Evris Mrishaj, 25, of Peterborough, and cousin Dardan Mrishaf, 37, of Hull, and Florjan Kasaj, 41, also of Hull, were convicted of conspiracy to produce class B drugs.
All four will be sentenced in February.
Southgate, originally from Brighton, has never revealed his real home address – even in court.
DC Smith said he engaged in “Albanian gang tactics” to hide his tracks, failing to register his modest 2009 plate Astra.
She said: “We knew he owned a lot of properties, but it took hard work to connect them to him through police records and tenuous links.
“He did everything he could to evade the law at every step of the way. The case didn’t feature a lot of text messages you’d usually find in this sort of conspiracy because he had daily briefings outside coffee houses.”
She revealed that even after his arrest in December 2022, the kingpin bought another house and tried to set up a new cannabis farm before cops shut him down.
Now the man who once set up a fake estate agents will soon find himself a tenant – of a prison cell.
Among the financial titans cleared to sell “exchange traded funds” that invest directly in bitcoin are Boston’s Fidelity Investments, along with other heavies such as BlackRock and VanEck. On Fidelity’s investment platform, one of the largest in the world, you can now buy these ETFs right alongside regular stocks and bonds.
Franklin Templeton, another investment giant, on Thursday posted a picture of its Ben Franklin avatar featuring the ‘laser eyes’ meme, usually used by crypto superfans on social media to embellish their profile pictures with a tongue-in-cheek, futuristic vibe.
“It’s a very big deal but possibly not for some of the reasons people have been excited on X, and all the memes and jokes of the last few hours,” said Christian Catalini, founder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab. “It’s a very important step toward bitcoin establishing itself as an important, new asset class that traditional finance institutions can directly engage with.”
(Catalini is also cofounder of the bitcoin payments company Lightspark.)
If you have not been paying attention to crypto following the market crushing implosion of the FTX exchange fourteen months ago, this might surprise you: Despite mounting regulatory and economic setbacks, crypto was a top market performer in 2023.
Bitcoin, the largest and most valuable cryptocurrency, surged 154 percent last year. Meanwhile, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index gained 24 percent, and Nasdaq rose some 44 percent.
All this was happening as one-time FTX chief executive Sam Bankman-Fried went on trial — and was convicted — for the fraud associated with his firm’s collapse.
“It’s been a wild ride to see the belief system of this industry come to fruition,” said Dave Balter, chief executive at FlipSide Crypto, a Cambridge firm that specializes in crypto data analysis. “The ‘big deal’ on a personal level’s a spiritual one, where disbelievers and contrarians now recognize why our conviction has never wavered.”
But even as some big names have come along to the crypto world, there are some high-profile holdouts — and they’re airing some of the same critiques that have faced crypto for years. Namely, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have always been among the riskiest, most volatile investments — prone to wild swings in value that are difficult to predict.
Vanguard, the bastion of plain-vanilla index funds, said it was not planning to offer bitcoin ETFs through its brokerage even as its competitors rushed to do so.
“Our perspective is that these products do not align with our offer focused on asset classes such as equities, bonds, and cash, which Vanguard views as the building blocks of a well-balanced, long-term investment portfolio,” the company said in a statement to The Wall Street Journal.
And lest anyone think crypto had lost its ability to unpleasantly surprise investors, the market took another big hit just days after the ETF approval many boosters had been eagerly awaiting. By Sunday, bitcoin had seen its price drop by upward of 10 percent from its midweek high as investors sought to take profits following the recent runup.
It was just the first week of growing pains in the relationship between bitcoin and the big-time traditional investment firms.
“It’s like communing with the enemy,” said Ryan Shea, a London-based crypto economist at the financial technology firm Trakx. “But for moms and pops to get comfortable in this world, to gain legitimacy, it’s important to get to the next level.”
Traditionally, buying bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies has looked a lot different than trading more familiar investments. Investors often must create accounts with crypto exchanges such as Coinbase (though a handful of stock brokerages offer some crypto services). And for those who want maximum control of their assets’ security, there are a handful of independent “crypto wallets” to use for storage.
Compare that process to the relative ease of investing in one of these new bitcoin ETFs, which you can buy and sell in the same way you’d trade shares in Microsoft or Nvidia. While ETFs for stock and other investments have long been available to brokerage customers, this is the first time one of these funds can actually hold bitcoin.
Already, the 11 funds approved by the SEC are battling it out over the new money in the market, and that could mean lower costs for consumers in the short term. They are competing on fees, which tend to be below 0.5 percent of assets, and some, such as ARK Investment Management, have temporarily waived fees altogether.
Bitcoin-linked products that were on the market before, including derivatives-based funds and trusts, charge as much as 2 to 3 percent.
“It’s a land grab,” said Paul Karger, cohead of Boston’s Twin Focus, a wealth adviser. “A handful of big winners will own most of the Main Street in-flows.”
Given the lower fees, these new funds may hew to the price action of bitcoin more closely. That is something their predecessors, which were largely based on futures contracts and have been around for two years and change, have not done. This discrepancy, called ‘tracking error’ in trade lingo, occurs when an ETF’s value diverges from its underlying assets.
Matthew Walsh, of Boston blockchain investor Castle Island Ventures, said that bitcoin futures ETFs have a “tracking error,” that can reach 5 to 10 percent, while he predicts the spot ETFs will have a one-to-one correlation to the underlying price of bitcoin. “It’s a huge win for the retail investor,” Walsh said.
Eric Biegeleisen, partner and deputy investment chief at ETF investor 3Edge, said with this move, bitcoin is a step closer to becoming a “legitimate” asset. While he likes having 11 funds to choose from, now comes the work to figure out which one he likes best. “Certainly, there are concerns right out of the gate,” he added. Chief among them are fraud and asset security.
It is going to take a huge amount of education to get investors comfortable, said Ophelia Snyder, cofounder and president of 21Shares, a financial firm that worked with ARK to create one of the new bitcoin ETFs. But the early signals show there’s a lot of potential.
“Crypto’s never seen money like this. A billion dollars is a lot of money in one day, but we saw that within the first two hours. This isn’t the same ballgame anymore.”
Suchita Nayar can be reached at suchita.nayar@globe.com.