![]() A “big accounting firm-one of the most highly respected,” Trump bragged, had put together a summary of his net worth, pegging it $8.7 billion. ![]() The day Trump announced he was running for president, he stood in the lobby of Trump Tower waiving a sheet of paper to the crowd and the cameras-his 2014 personal balance sheet, compiled by Mazars. In 2006, Trump laid out documents claiming a net worth of $6 billion our research put him at $2.9 billion. In 1990, Trump showed us documents claiming a pile of cash and securities-but left out that he had borrowed big against his portfolio. We saw a number of them over the years, and never found them persuasive. It declined to restructure the debt.įorbes also knew better than to rely on Trump’s balance sheets. The bank did its own analysis, which determined the building was worth $257 million. According to recent legal filings by the New York attorney general, when Trump’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, tried to refinance the loan from Capital One in 2015, he touted the $550 million valuation of the skyscraper on Trump’s 2014 statement. Capital One, which loaned Trump $160 million against his Wall Street skyscraper, apparently knew Trump’s math didn’t add up. In other words, for years Trump’s accountants were willing to sign off on their famous client’s numbers-but admitted that if you want to know what Trump is really worth, you might not want to look at his balance sheet at all. ![]() “They were doing their own risk management,” says Francine McKenna, an accountant and former Forbes contributor. Trump if they had access to a revised statement” that complied with GAAP standards. In all three years, the accountants issued a word of caution: “Because the significance and pervasiveness of the matters discussed above make it difficult to assess their impact on the statement of financial condition, users of this financial statement should recognize that they might reach different conclusions about the financial condition of Donald J. Trump’s 2012 balance sheet contained a similar disclaimer from Trump’s accountants-and similar stretches of the truth by Trump. There were much bigger transgressions as well, like Trump completely leaving off some of his mortgages when calculating his net worth. There were little issues, like Trump not disclosing his ownership stakes in properties or listing cash and marketable securities together instead of separately. “I was surprised at how many different things didn’t follow GAAP” on the 2011 statement, says Terri Herron, an accounting professor at the University of Montana.
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