Billionaire donors were willing to help Donald Trump with the multimillion-dollar bond he would have had to raise to appeal his civil fraud judgment awarded to the state of New York, according to a new report.
The news merged as his son, Eric Trump, also said dozens of bond companies had refused to help his father as the Republican front-runner faced the risk of having his assets seized by the state attorney general.
Attorney General Letitia James could have enforced the $454 million judgment against Trump once it became final last month. However, she granted Trump a 30-day reprieve that ended on Monday, March 25. Yet, an appeals court ruled Monday that Trump only had to pay a $175 million bond within 10 days to appeal the judgment, which Trump then said he would “abide by.”
However, during an appearance on “Sunday Morning Futures,” the younger Trump griped to Fox News host Maria Bartiromo that he had participated in negotiations with multiple sureties who basically laughed at the former president as he struggled to raise $464 million to salvage his New York empire.
“Every single person when I came to them saying, ‘Hey, can I get a half-billion dollar bond?’” Eric Trump told Bartiromo about the high-stakes discussions, adding: “Maria: they were laughing. They were laughing.”
Previously, the surety companies said they were not willing to accept real estate or other hard assets as collateral for such a large amount of money.
Trump was ordered to pay the massive fine after being found liable for inflating the value of his New York real estate, including his hotels and golf clubs while manipulating his taxes and defrauding banks and insurers for decades.
Still, it is a contrast from the $558 million in collateral for the original bond, which Trump would have been required to pay to surety companies, according to his attorneys. During the March 24 news segment, Eric Trump accused the billionaire bondholders of…
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