NEW YORK: Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump testified on Wednesday that she did not recall details of real-estate deals she worked on at her father’s company, in a New York civil fraud trial that threatens the former US president’s business empire.
Like her brothers Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, who testified last week, Ivanka Trump sought to distance herself from the questionable valuation methods that have already been ruled fraudulent by the judge overseeing the trial.
Trump, by contrast, has acknowledged on the witness stand that some of the estimates of golf courses, office towers and other company assets were inaccurate.
The lawsuit by New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, accuses Trump and his family businesses of manipulating real estate asset values to dupe lenders and insurers and embellish Trump’s reputation as a successful businessman.
Unlike her siblings and father, Ivanka Trump is not a defendant in the case.
As a top executive at the Trump Organisation between 2011 and 2017, Ivanka said she focused on redeveloping the Doral golf course in Florida and the Old Post Office property in Washington.
At the trial, she was shown a 2011 email in which she acknowledged that a requirement by lender Deutsche Bank that her father maintain a net worth of at least $3 billion was a problem but encouraged company officials to approve it anyway.
We wanted to get a great rate and the only way to get proceeds/term and principal where we want them is to guarantee the deal, she wrote to a Trump Organisation lawyer. On the witness stand, she said she favored the deal but did not recall specific terms. “I felt generally that the deal terms with Deutsche Bank for Doral were positive,” she said.
Published in Dawn, November 9th, 2023
Source: dawn.com