"Within days, Donald Trump could potentially have his sprawling real estate business empire ordered ‘dissolved’ for repeated misrepresentations on financial statements to lenders, adding him to a short list of scam marketers, con artists and others who have been hit with the ultimate punishment for violating New York’s powerful anti-fraud law,” the AP reports.
“An Associated Press analysis of nearly 70 years of civil cases under the law showed that such a penalty has only been imposed a dozen previous times, and Trump’s case stands apart in a significant way: It’s the only big business found that was threatened with a shutdown without a showing of obvious victims and major losses.”
AP has been really pro-Trump the last several years. No victims? How is evading taxes victimless? We’re all paying for him.
There are multiple victims. First, as you say, there are the citizens of New York City and New York State. They have paid for the services that Trump’s empire there has utilized. His business could not exist without roads, utility lines, and all the other myriad services that taxes pay for. By not paying his fair share, the rest of the tax payers have had to subsidized his enterprise.
The other class of victim that rarely comes up is the banks themselves. Sure, the loans may have been repaid, well, except for that mysterious $48 million dollar loan that was forgiven. (By the way, how the hell do you get a bank to just up and forgive a $48 million dollar loan? Does that make any sense to anyone?) Anyway, my real point is that banks make profit from interest on loan repayment. The higher the risk of the loan, the higher the interest rate they charge. By falsifying the values of his properties, he was misleading the banks and getting more favorable interest rates than they would otherwise have given him. A bank that could have made a million dollars of interest on a given loan may only have made half a million because of his deception. I can’t really bring myself to feel sorry for a bank, but it does make them a victim of his crime.
By the way, how the hell do you get a bank to just up and forgive a $48 million dollar loan? Does that make any sense to anyone?
“If you owe the bank $100, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.”
― J Paul Getty
Sounds a bit like…{turns head left, then right, then center and whispers}…socialism.
Funny how the rich frame and define who is a victim and when. They get to escape justice by constantly moving goal posts.
Unprecedented crimes require unprecedented punishments. Fuck whatever Trump simp wrote this article.
I’m really tired of so many people saying that doing something as a consequence for Trump’s actions would set a new precedent. So many things that he has done are unprecedented. There is no FAQ for when the president refuses to transfer power or when a “billionaire” politician is caught perpetrating decades of multitudes of types of fraud.
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some legal experts worry that if the judge goes out of his way to punish the former president with that worst-case scenario, it could make it easier for courts to wipe out companies in the future.
Oh no, companies may not get to act criminally without consequences anymore…
The AG prosecuting this doesn’t even want his businesses dissolved:
For her part, New York Attorney General Letitia James has asked that Trump be banned from doing business in New York and pay $370 million, what she estimates is saved interest and other “ill-gotten gains.” But she never asked for a property sale and may not even want one. Said one of her lawyers, Kevin Wallace, in his closing argument, “I don’t think we are looking for anything that would cause the liquidation of business.”
$370 million is a hefty sum, though. And the fact that the AG admits that it would not cause a 'dissolution of the business" means that she thinks the penalty can be extracted without liquidating everything… But Trump wouldn’t be allowed to be in charge of whatever’s left.
Good luck enforcing that last part, though. Whoever ends up taking over the business will probably need to get a new phone number, and make sure Trump never finds out what it is.
So we’re gonna just keep lowering the bar to spare this loser’s feelings?
Lowering the bar would be not doing what they would regularly do. Doing something that has never been done against him would be setting a new bar.
It has been done. 12 times. Did u miss that part?
Per the article, this would be the first time it was done with no victim and no major losses. Did u miss that part?
The victim is the taxpayers of New York. The losses are the amount that they could not collect.
Did the prosecution even argue that in court? I don’t recall seeing it. The argument was that he was vastly overestimating the value of his properties to get favorable loan terms, not underestimatkng to avoid to taxes. I believe the tax valuation was used against him to show he lied when going for the loans, but I’ve not seen any argument that he substantially underestimated the property value to avoid taxes.
If they had been going after him for tax evasion, the charges would be different, i believe.
(edit) lol Downvotes but no explanation. I love this place sometimes.
The obvious victims in this case were NY taxpayers in general, and the major losses were the unpaid taxes that could have been used for any number of important and worthwhile public projects.
I cannot think of those for which Trump has more contempt. A dissolution of his so-called “empire” and a surrender of those assets to us, the People of New York, would be some sweet, sweet justice, as would banning both him and his sons from conducting business here, even if only for several years.
Not to mention the fact that it would completely and utterly destroy his identity as a “successful businessman“. 
