Banker involved in Trump’s company testifies for defense
NEW
When Deutsche Bank loaned Donald Trump’s company hundreds of millions lawyers of dollars, the bank always followed its own guidelines that include checking out information that would-be borrowers provide, an executive testified Tuesday at the former president’s civil fraud trial.
The loans — for projects in Florida, Chicago and Washington, D.C. — are a focus of New York Attorney General Letitia James’ lawsuit contending that Trump and his company deceived lenders and insurers by giving them financial statements that baldly overstated his asset values and overall net worth. The YORK >> defendants deny the allegations.
Deutsche Bank reviewed the financial statements before making the loans through its department that works with rich individuals — a pathway that allowed for more favorable interest rates than likely available from the commercial real estate division, according to the lawsuit. The deals came with conditions about Trump’s net worth and, sometimes, liquidity, and they often required annual submissions of his financial statements.
But, testifying for the defense, managing director David Williams said the bankers viewed clients’ reports of their net worth as “subjective or subject to estimates” and took its own view of such financial statements. “I think we expect clients-provided information to be accurate. At the same time, it’s not an industry standard that these statements be audited. They’re largely reliant on the use of estimates,” Williams said, so bankers routinely “make some adjustments.”
At times, the bank pegged Trump’s wealth at several billion dollars lower than he did, according to documents and testimony. In 2019, for example, Trump’s financial statement listed his net worth at $5.8 billion, which the bank adjusted down to $2.5 billion.
But Williams said such differences weren’t necessarily unusual or alarming.
“It’s a conservative measure to make these adjustments,” he testified, characterizing them as “standard” and a “stress test” of financial strength.
The attorney general’s office, however, has maintained that such adjustments were never intended to account for the alleged fraud. A now-retired Deutsche Bank executive, Nicholas Haigh, testified earlier in the trial that he assumed the figures “were broadly accurate,” though the bank subjected them to “sanity checks” and sometimes made sizable “haircuts.”
Trump acted as the guarantor for the loans and was quick to act when the bank raised concerns that the properties weren’t generating enough cash to make payments, Williams said.