With Donald Trump barred from running his company, former U.S. District Court Judge Barbara Jones has been appointed to manage the business.
MARKET WATCH
For the first time in the history of the Trump Organization, many of the key financial decisions will not be made by a Trump.
Following a ruling by a New York state judge Friday barring Donald Trump and his two eldest sons from having any role in running the real-estate empire that was founded in 1927 by the former president’s father, the company has been placed in the hands of a court-appointed monitor.
Barbara Jones, a lawyer and former federal judge, will now have total oversight of the real-estate conglomerate that played a central role in shaping the public image that helped Trump win the White House in 2016.
Jones, 76, has been serving as a monitor at the Trump Organization since November 2022, when she was appointed by New York State Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron to oversee certain financial matters at the company. The appointment came shortly after New York Attorney General Letitia James brought civil fraud charges against Trump and members of his family, accusing them of ripping off banks and insurers by routinely misstating the value of their properties.
Following Jones’s initial appointment, the company was required to inform her of any financial move it made after the fact. But now it will need her approval before taking any steps involving financial disclosures to third parties — primarily meaning loan applications to banks.
The judge’s ruling also ordered that an independent compliance officer, who will report to Jones, be hired within 30 days.
Jones, who became a partner at Bracewell LLP after serving 16 years on the federal bench in the Southern District of New York, now takes the helm of a corporation made up of 415 separate entities that include properties, licensing deals and management arrangements, according to court filings. The entities all are held as part of the Donald J. Trump revocable trust, which was formed in Florida in 2014 and amended as recently as 2021.
In a report issued to Engoron before his ruling in the Trump Organization fraud case, Jones said that she had determined the company had multiple “disclosure deficiencies,” in which financial reports were “either incomplete or demonstrated a lack of transparency.”
Trump’s lawyers challenged the findings and said Jones had engaged in a “Javert-like quest against the defendants” — a reference to the relentless prosecutor from the novel and musical “Les Miserables” — and was interested only in continuing her role as monitor, for which Bracewell had already collected $2.6 million in fees.
