Donald Trump will learn this Friday (13) how the company that bears the name of the former US president will be punished after being found guilty of conspiring to defraud tax authorities for 15 years.
A New York state judge will impose the sentence after jurors in Manhattan found two Trump Organization affiliates guilty of 17 criminal charges last month.
The sentencing comes three days after Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Juan Merchan ordered Allen Weisselberg, who worked for the Trump family for half a century and was the company’s former chief financial officer, jailed for five months after testifying. as the main witness for the prosecution.
Trump’s company only faces a maximum penalty of $1.6 million, but said it plans to appeal. No one else has been charged or facing jail time in the case.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, which filed the case, is still conducting a criminal investigation into Trump’s business practices.
Bill Black, a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas School of Law who specializes in white-collar crime, called the expected penalty a “rounding error” that offers “zero deterrence” to others, including Trump.
“This is a scam,” he said. “No one will stop committing this type of crime because of this sentence.”
The case has been a thorn in the side of the former Republican president, who considers it part of a witch hunt by Democrats who dislike him and his politics.
Trump also faces a $250 million civil lawsuit from state attorney general Letitia James, accusing him and his adult children Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump of inflating his net worth and the value of his company’s assets to save money on loans and insurance.
Bragg and James are Democrats, as is Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance, who filed the criminal case. Trump plans to run for president in 2024 after losing his 2020 re-election bid.
In a four-week trial, prosecutors presented evidence that Trump’s company covered personal expenses, such as rent and car rentals for executives, without declaring them as income, and pretended that Christmas bonuses were not employee compensation. .
Trump himself signed bonus checks, prosecutors said, as well as rent on Weisselberg’s luxury Manhattan apartment and private school tuition for the CFO’s grandchildren.
“The whole narrative that Donald Trump was blissfully ignorant is just not true,” Assistant District Attorney Joshua Steinglass told jurors in his closing argument.
Weisselberg’s testimony helped convict the company, although he said Trump was not part of the fraud scheme. He also declined to help Bragg with his broader Trump investigation.
The Trump Organization has placed Weisselberg on paid leave until they cut ties this week. Her lawyer said the split, announced on Tuesday, was amicable.
Weisselberg, 75, is serving his sentence at New York’s notorious Rikers Island Prison.
State law limits the penalties Judge Merchan can impose on Trump’s company. A corporation can be fined up to $250,000 for each tax-related count and $10,000 for each non-tax count.
Trump faces several other legal issues, including investigations related to the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, his retention of confidential documents after leaving the White House, and efforts to reverse his defeat in the 2020 Georgia election.
(Reporting by Karen Freifeld and Jonathan Stempel; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)
Source: CNN Brasil
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