‘Trump helped parents hide millions of dollars in taxes’
US president, White House dismiss New York Times article alleging dubious transactions
WASHINGTON : President Donald Trump on Wednesday expressed outrage over a New York Times report that he received at least $413 million from his father over the decades, much of that through dubious tax dodges, including outright fraud.
Trump accused the newspaper of “doing a very old, boring and often told hit piece on me.”
The 15,000-word Times report contradicts Trump’s portrayal of himself as a self-made billionaire who started with just a $1 mn loan from his father.
The Times says Trump and his father, Fred, avoided gift and inheritance taxes by setting up a sham corporation and undervaluing assets to tax authorities.
The Times says its report is based on more than 100,000 pages of financial documents, including confidential tax returns from the father and his companies.
A lawyer for Trump, Charles J Harder, told The Times that there was no “fraud or tax evasion” and that the facts cited in the report are “extremely inaccurate.”
The White House dismissed the report as a “misleading attack against the Trump family by the failing New York Times.”
The New York state tax department said it was reviewing the allegations in The Times and “is vigorously pursuing all appropriate avenues of investigation.”
The Times said the Trump family hid millions of dollars of transfers from the father to his children through a sham company owned by the children called All County Building Supply & Maintenance. Set up in 1992 ostensibly as a purchasing agent to supply Fred Trump’s buildings with boilers, cleaning supplies and other goods, the father would pad invoices with markups of 20% or even 50%, thereby avoiding gift taxes, the newspaper reported.
In total, the president’s father and mother transferred over $1 billion to their children, according to the newspaper’s tally.
That should have produced a tax bill of at least $550 million, based on a 55% tax on gifts and inheritance at the time. Fred transferred ownership of most of his real estate empire to his four living children before he died.