This month, former United States President Donald Trump was hit with a massive $454 million judgment in a civil fraud trial in New York after he was found to have fraudulently misrepresented the value of his assets to receive more favorable loan terms. And one of the things Trump was caught doing was particularly shocking.
According to Martin Williams of The Herald Scotland, Donald Trump was found to have fraudulently over-inflated the value of some golf club properties on his Trump International Golf Club in Aberdeen, Scotland by as much as $250 million.
But to make matters worse, the properties he fraudulently overvalued didn’t even exist at all.
“A US judge has found that it had been wrongly stated that 2500 homes had already been built as part of a project associated with the loss-making Trump International Golf Club in Aberdeen. But there was planning permission to build only 500 and no development had taken place,” Williams wrote for The Herald.
“According to a judge’s civil fraud case findings of fact at one point the Trump organisation had valued the 2500-home development at £83,164 when an appraisal it received placed it at less than half that. That put the value of the undeveloped Aberdeen land at £207.9m.”
It’s pretty brazen fraud from the former president and it explains why he was hit with such an expensive judgment.