Donald Trump Evaded Tax Through Fraud, Reaped Riches From Father: NYT

The newspaper, in its October 2 edition, published an article titled "Trump engaged in suspect tax schemes as he reaped riches from his father," is based onconfidential tax returns and financial records. It  claims that Trump had inherited today’s equivalent of $413 million from his father Fred C Trump. The findings contradicts Trump’s portrayal as a “self-made billionaire” who started with just a $1 million loan from his father.

"Mr. Trump won the presidency proclaiming himself a self-made billionaire, and he has long insisted that his father, the legendary New York City builder Fred C. Trump, provided almost no financial help," the article says.

"But The Times’s investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day," it added.

Much of this money came to  Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes, the article said adding that Trump and his siblings in part "set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents.” It says that the president’s parents had transferred wealth worth over $1 billion to their children which would evoke a tax bill of at least $550 million under the then existing 55 percent tax rate on gifts and inheritances.

He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.

However, the president has paid only $52.2 million, or about 5 percent of the taxes, with the help of variety of tax dodges., reported the NYT article citing records of tax returns.

The investigation report says that Trump was already a millionaire at the age of 8 because of his father’s wealth. “By age 3, he was earning $200,000 a year in today’s dollars from his father’s empire. He was a millionaire by age 8. In his 40s and 50s, he was receiving more than $5 million a year," it says.

"The president declined repeated requests over several weeks to comment for this article. But a lawyer for Mr. Trump, Charles J. Harder, provided a written statement on Monday, one day after The Times sent a detailed description of its findings, the NYT report said. “The New York Times’s allegations of fraud and tax evasion are 100 percent false, and highly defamatory,” Harder said. “There was no fraud or tax evasion by anyone. The facts upon which The Times bases its false allegations are extremely inaccurate," the lawyer said.

Backing up Trump’s claims about his wealth, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told the American newspaper that the president had taken a loan of 1$ million from his father which he had already repaid.

The president’s brother, Robert Trump, issued a statement on behalf of the Trump family:

“Our dear father, Fred C. Trump, passed away in June 1999. Our beloved mother, Mary Anne Trump, passed away in August 2000. All appropriate gift and estate tax returns were filed, and the required taxes were paid. Our father’s estate was closed in 2001 by both the Internal Revenue Service and the New York State tax authorities, and our mother’s estate was closed in 2004. Our family has no other comment on these matters that happened some 20 years ago, and would appreciate your respecting the privacy of our deceased parents, may God rest their souls," it said.

The NYT findings are based on interviews with Fred Trump’s former employees and advisers and more than 100,000 pages of documents describing the inner workings and immense profitability of his empire. They include documents culled from public sources — mortgages and deeds, probate records, financial disclosure reports, regulatory records and civil court files.