"Within days, Donald Trump could potentially have his sprawling real estate business empire ordered ‘dissolved’ for repeated misrepresentations on financial statements to lenders, adding him to a short list of scam marketers, con artists and others who have been hit with the ultimate punishment for violating New York’s powerful anti-fraud law,” the AP reports.
“An Associated Press analysis of nearly 70 years of civil cases under the law showed that such a penalty has only been imposed a dozen previous times, and Trump’s case stands apart in a significant way: It’s the only big business found that was threatened with a shutdown without a showing of obvious victims and major losses.”
The obvious victims in this case were NY taxpayers in general, and the major losses were the unpaid taxes that could have been used for any number of important and worthwhile public projects.
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Ultimately, the victims are kind of ancillary where fraud of this nature is concerned. Everyone involved could profit from the sale of cocaine, but that doesn’t make the sale any less illegal. Likewise, you don’t get to lie on your appraisal forms to game the system and generate free money, because that has long-term economic impacts far beyond the scope of direct victims.
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Yeah, and that’s why I said “kind of.” The faceless public is certainly the victim (as is always the case with anything related to Trump), but it’s really hard to personify a nebulous group that will be indirectly affected in the coming years (or were affected in ways unseen over the years).
Fraud was committed, and fraud laws exist to protect the public and the markets from that kind of manipulation at their expense.
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