NEWSWEEK
Donald Trump has dissolved 106 of his companies since a judge forced him to place his business empire under an independent monitor, a financial report has shown.
The 106 are among the 521 companies identified by monitor Barbara Jones as being part of the Trump Organization, the parent company that oversees the hundreds of companies within the Trump real-estate empire. Jones has had great difficulty obtaining information about the dissolved companies and asked questions to the Trump Organization for eight months.
In September, Judge Arthur Engoron issued a partial summary judgment in the case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James, ruling that Trump and top executives at the Trump Organization committed fraud. Engoron held that Trump grossly inflated the value of his assets to obtain more favorable terms from lenders and insurers. Engoron then stripped the companies of their business certificates and appointed retired judge Jones to monitor them.
Trump denies any wrongdoing and has repeatedly said the case is part of a political witch hunt aimed at derailing him as frontrunner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.
Jones has written a final report for Engoron, who must decide the punishment for Donald Trump and the Trump Organization for fraudulent overstatement of assets to obtain bank loans. Engoron must also decide if Trump should be banned for life from the real-estate industry, as James has requested.
Jones’ report shows that she spent eight months trying to find out information about the dissolution of the 106 companies and was only given information about them months after they were dissolved.
Of the 521 companies, “51 were dissolved by the Trump Organization during the monitorship in late 2022 and early 2023. An additional 55 entities were dissolved in September and October 2023,” Jones’ report into the company found.
Jones wrote in her report that she struggled for months to get any information on the dissolution of Trump companies.
“While I was informed of planned dissolutions in April 2023, the Trump Organization was not prepared to effectuate the dissolutions at that time. I requested that the Trump Organisation advise me immediately when the entities were dissolved. It was not until I inquired in December 2023 that I learned that many, but not all of the entities, had been dissolved in September and October 2023,” she wrote.
Jones added that, after the dissolutions, there are now 415 companies in the Trump Organization. Of these, 21 are “Fred Trump entities” that were set up by the Republican’s father, the real-estate investor, Fred Trump. Seventy companies are “operating entities” that generate revenue through rent and other property income. These include companies that control The Trump…
