Trump Organization and CFO will be criminally charged, report says

Donald Trump’s family business and its chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, will face tax-related criminal charges from the Manhattan district attorney’s office on 1 July, according toThe Wall Street Journal.

The charges against the Trump Organization and its longtime company chief are the culmination of a years-long investigation from Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, who sought Mr Trump’s tax returns and other financial documents in a probe involving the former president and his associates over possible allegations of fraud and other schemes tied to his business.

On Monday, attorneys for the company reportedly met with prosecutors under a last-minute deadline to dissuade them from moving forward with charges against the company, which serves as an umbrella for Mr Trump’s real estate and other business holdings. Since 2017, the company has been held under a trust controlled by the former president and his adult sons, along with Mr Weisselberg.

In a statement, Mr Trump said that his dealings are “standard practice throughout the US business community, and in no way a crime”.

The Trump Organization’s legal team anticipates charges related to alleged failures to pay taxes on fringe benefits and corporate perks, including cash, cars and property given to employees; it’s unclear who received those benefits and what the total amounts to.

Mary Mulligan, an attorney for Mr Weisselberg, declined to comment to The Independent.

In February, the district attorney’s office – working in tandem with the New York Attorney General’s office – obtained years of the former president’s financial documents after a protracted legal battle that reached the US Supreme Court.

Mr Vance’s office has not publicly revealed the scope of potential allegations, but court filings in 2020 revealed that his office argued that previously reported allegations of tax and insurance fraud justified a grand jury probe into the former president and his company.

In documents filed in the US Circuit Court of Appeals, prosecutors argued that “mountainous” allegations against the president – including misstatements about his business properties to insurers, potential lenders and the government – “could establish crimes” including tax and insurance fraud and falsification of business records, among others.

“Thus, even if the grand jury were testing the truth of public allegations alone, such reports, taken together, fully justify the scope of the grand jury subpoena at issue in this case,” prosecutors argued.

The nation’s high court rejected arguments from the former president and his legal team that he retained an executive “immunity” from complying with subpoenas, while swatting away the investigation as a “fishing expedition” or part of a partisan “witch hunt”.