Trump committed financial fraud; now comes price tag
By Timothy L. O’Brien / Bloomberg Opinion
As one of Donald Trump’s much-anticipated fraud trials kicks off in a Manhattan courtroom today, consider the witness list.
Trump and his three eldest children are scheduled to testify, and some witnesses are slated to appear both in Trump’s defense and for the prosecution team lead by New York State Attorney General Letitia James. One of those switch-hitters, Rosemary Vrablic, particularly intrigues me.
Vrablic once advised Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner as a private banker at Deutsche Bank AG, the sprawling, scandal-plagued German bank that had long courted Trump as a way to jump-start its U.S. banking business.
And Trump was a slippery client, even for a bank that repeatedly found itself being investigated for a range of suspected violations such as money laundering, tax evasion, bribery, market manipulation and lax regulatory and compliance standards.In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Deutsche extended loans and peddled debt for Trump in deals worth about $825 million; when other large banks wouldn’t touch him because of his track record as a serial bankruptcy artist. The bank stuck by him after his casino company subsequently defaulted on $400 million in bonds that Deutsche sold on his behalf and lent him an additional $640 million to help fund a Chicago development. When that project’s viability was threatened after the 2008 financial crisis, Trump sued the bank, seeking damages and claiming he didn’t have to repay because the crisis amounted to an unforeseeable catastrophe.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-trump-committed-financial-fraud-now-comes-price-tag/
