No. of Recommendations: 4
WTH: The near- billion dollar assessment of Mar-a-lago in large part assumes what it COULD be worth if parceled out into individual lots and converted into single family mansions. Of course, it CANNOT be parceled out like that because the zoning of the existing plot prohibits that in perpetuity. That seems to be one of the factors that aggravated the judge so much because that very issue seems to have come up before.
Wow, that explains a lot. When I looked into Estate Taxes I discovered one of the tricks was to put restrictive clauses on your property that would reduce the value. You could reduce a business from 30 million to 3 million if done properly. And they had special methods of evaluating property. All organized to keep Estate Tax attorneys well paid. So it isn't hard to convince me that restrictions on an asset could lower the value of a property sginificantly.
WTH: That, coupled with "It doesn't matter what I evaluate a property at cuz I can always get a Saudi to offer whatever amount I say."
I marveled at that one. Several columnists have suggested that comment should be looked into. :)
WTH: Trump's inflation of the square footage of his penthouse apartment within Trump Tower ALONE should have been enough to seal this case. His apartment occupies ONE FLOOR of the building. The OUTSIDE DIMENSIONS of the building equate to about 10,000 square feet. A single floor apartment in a 10,000 square foot footprint building cannot comprise 31,000 square feet. One would think any bank seeing such claims about the apartment as collateral could have verified that with Wilipedia without leaving their chair.
That is easy to verify if you have the address. So no one ever looked, or if they did look were told on the QT not to bring it up.
WTH: I'm glad Trump is finally seeing justice on this but it never should have reached this point. This has been Trump's modus operandi for 40 plus years and journalists like David Cay Johnson have been covering this for at least 15 years. The lies were so blatant that any audit would have turned up dozens of charges in a week or two of effort.
That is so true, it's how he operates and it took me some time to come to grips with that. If you are in the cult you will just think he is a genius for doing this stuff, and, on top of that, he essentially laundered money for the Soviets and got paid. I'm not sure I know everything he did for the Saudis. Oh hell, once we knock him out of the picture it all will come out I'm sure. If you do it now Trump will sic his thugs on you.
