Trump Org controller withdraws in Donald Trump’s NYC fraud lawsuit, blames outside accountant for inaccurate financial statements
by Shawn Johnson November 21, 2023 in Finance
Trump Org controller withdraws in Donald Trump’s NYC fraud lawsuit, blames outside accountant for inaccurate financial statements
NEW YORK — The Trump Organization’s longtime controller returned to the witness stand Monday as a defense witness in Donald Trump’s financial fraud trial and continued to downplay his role in the fraudulent financial statements at the center of the case.
Jeffrey McConkey, accused in a $250 million lawsuit against Trump and his high-ranking officials, again placed responsibility on the company’s outside accountants.
“Anything they asked, we’d do,” McConkey claimed of Donald Bender of the Mazars accounting firm. He said he was “very” dependent on the accountant.
He later testified, “We provided them with everything they needed.”
The case has been described by New York Attorney General Tish James as playing a key role in McConkey’s years-long scheme to unfairly boost Trump’s bottom line by billions in order to profit from illegal business deals.
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As deputy to ex-Trump Organization finance chief Allen Weisselberg, he devised the calculations behind the figures in annual statements tallying Trump’s net worth from 2011 to 2017 and after Trump was elected, according to the state’s case. The latter supervised and approved this process until his retirement. In 2022.
McConkey’s data spreadsheet breaking down the assessment, known internally as “Jeff Supporting Data”, has been described as a “key location” of Trump and his associates’ fraud in the AG’s case. The AG says that after calculating the numbers with input from the Trump children, he provided them to Mazars to format them into statements used in loan applications and other lucrative deals.
Trump and his co-defendants have tried to blame Bender — whom authorities have not accused of wrongdoing — for any inaccuracies in the final product. When Weisselberg and the company were criminally charged with tax fraud in a separate scheme, which resulted in their conviction last year, he still tried to incriminate them.
When he testified at the first trial, Bender said that Trump’s company retained Mazars to compile its internal data, not to audit them. He said Trump officials were “not giving us all the documents we potentially needed to compile the collection.”
Asked Monday by Trump attorney Jesus Suarez whether he ever hid anything from Bender, McConkey said, “No.”
When McConkey was asked what Mazars did to fact-check the data, he said that outside accountants would “look at the footnotes” and make the necessary changes. He said he did not remember ever refusing to do anything Bender asked him to do.
Asked what his ranking was on his list of responsibilities and how much time he spent working on statements, McConkey claimed “very little” outside of July and October.
“It was just a matter of gathering all the information,” he said.
Judge Arthur Engoron, in a pre-trial ruling, found McConkey, Weisselberg, Trump and his older sons, Eric and Don Jr., liable for widespread fraud based on the evidence they provided and did not dispute the showing that the statements. Fraudulently increased their prices. $2.2 billion over several years.
He is considering the AG’s remaining six claims in the lawsuit, which imperil the family real estate empire, alleging underlying conspiracy, insurance fraud and how Trump and his crew illegally lied about his net worth. How much money have you earned? Evidence presented by the AG showed that the banks lost more than $300 million in interest due to the lies.
McConkey is expected to remain a witness for the defense on Tuesday and then face cross-examination. Trump’s lawyers have called more than a half-dozen witnesses since launching their case last week with Don Jr., who similarly indicted the outside accountant.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who faces 91 felony charges and multiple lawsuits in four criminal cases, denies all wrongdoing along with his co-defendants. He has not participated in his lawyers’ defense of the case. Their main argument is that appraising buildings is an art, not a science, and that banks and lenders have gotten rich by doing business with Trump.
In a tweet on Monday, AG James said the testimony of Trump’s expert witnesses — who testified that the company’s method of evaluating buildings was standard — should be taken lightly.
“Many of these experts are longtime friends and golf buddies of Donald Trump,” the AG tweeted. “One donated millions of dollars to Donald Trump’s campaign and his son even had a wedding at Mar-a-Lago.”
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Source: www.bing.com
