Tax assessments can be weird, and I also don't know if I've ever heard of someone asking the tax assessor to increase the value of the assessment so they can pay more in taxes. If you get assessed below market value because of some peculiarity in the assessor's office, you're lucky.
Assessments where I am habitually run below market value. So am I now liable for fraud if I value my house at what the realtor says is the market rate, rather than the assessed rate?
More to the point, is this New York DA going to prosecute every instance of a borrower listing a reasonable market value for a piece of property even if it exceeds the assessed value? Or is this just a Trump thing?
From everything I've read, it sounds like the market value of Trump's property in Miami - as opposed to the tax assessor's valuation --clearly is greatly in excess of that assessed value. Sounds to me like the judge thinks he found a "gotcha" to get a guy that he really, really wanted to get.
I imagine the question of law presented on appeal will be something like: "is it error for a court to consider conclusive an out-of-state tax-assessed value of a property without regard to other evidence indicating a higher market value"? Or something like that.
Question: if the deed to your house contained a restriction stating that the property could not be used for anything other than a single residence structure, and you were in a neighborhood where the other properties were being built with multi-family apartment units, would you be acting in good faith if you valued your property on the basis that it could be sold to a developer to build multi-family apartment units on it?
That is essentially what Trump was doing - he was intentionally ignoring restrictions that limited the use of the property, and claiming a value that intentionally ignored those restrictions.
Whether he would have gotten away with it or not is irrelevant to the statute in question, which polices conduct that is conducive to fraud, not actual fraud itself.
It is precisely like a speed limit law: it is no defense to a speeding ticket to say "there was nobody else on the road who might have been injured by my speeding, anyone who was there could have seen me in time to avoid me, and I didn't actually injure anyone."
Just so, it is no defense to a claim under this statute that nobody actually relied on your lies, that anyone who interacted with you could have done their own due diligence and determined the value of the property for themselves, and nobody actually got defrauded by my lies.
Trump consistently came up with very high values that he cannot justify, because he doesn't even have something as simple as a broker's price opinion from another broker saying "I reviewed the property, I found these three comparables, and based on these factors, I determined that the value of Mar-a-Lago is likely between $x million and $y million."
Trump didn't even have someone within his own organization do a simple comparables analysis to gut-check the values he was coming up with. He just made up whatever numbers he needed to have in order to end up giving his lenders a Statement of Financial Condition that said he was still rich enough to have not violated any of the covenants on his loans.
That is an atmosphere that is conducive to fraud. The fact that in this case he was dealing with banks that were sophisticated enough, and had enough resources, to do their own fact-checking is neither here nor there; it does not vitiate the fact that he was intentionally lying about the value of his properties.
It's not a witch-hunt, it's the big blowhard with the hopped up, blown out Chevelle with the fat tires on the back finally getting his comeuppance after years and years of burnouts and speeding down main street.
