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Cash-strapped ex-New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani confirmed he flew first-class to the Republican National Convention — but not at his own expense, according to a new court filing.
The judge in Giuliani’s bankruptcy case ordered the Chapter 11 case to be dismissed on July 12, while the terms of the dismissal have not yet been finalized.
Lawyers for his bankruptcy creditors learned at a July 17 hearing that the disgraced former mayor had blown through $30,000 in a one-week span. A statement for one bank account, which had $60,000 on July 10, showed that he had spent tens of thousands on his two properties as well as an unknown amount at the RNC in Milwaukee.
CNN had reported that Giuliani had flown first-class with a personal assistant on a Delta flight from New York to Milwaukee, where he took a tumble.
One day after the hearing, Rachel Strickland, a lawyer for the defamed election workers Giuliani owes nearly $150m, wrote a letter to the judge citing the report: “In light of the Debtor’s claims of limited access to cash and new reports of the Debtor, his assistant, and his companion flying first class this week”...the creditors have requested “additional disclosure from the Debtor regarding his recent expenditures.”
Giuliani’s lawyer Gary Fischoff in a July 23 letter blasted the claim as an “unsubstantiated rumor.”
Fischoff attached a letter signed by the president of FrankSpeech — Mike Lindell’s broadcasting platform that recently hired Giuliani to host a TV program — writing that the company “entirely covered” the former mayor’s flight and hotel in Milwaukee from July 14 through the 20, the letter says.
At the last hearing, Strickland said draining half of his bank account is evidence that the former mayor “is up to Giuliani shenanigans yet again.” The bank statement revealed that he had spent $14,000 on New York condo expenses, $25,000 for the Florida condo association, and a series of “relatively small charges” to marketing firms, Amazon and Apple, Strickland told the court.
Creditors have been asking for his financial disclosures to determine how to finalize the dismissal, namely how Giuliani could pay the administrative fees incurred throughout the bankruptcy case.
“Debtor’s counsel said he doesn’t have that much money. So we weren’t quibbling with the concept of getting blood from a stone,” Strickland said. She proposed that whatever amount he had in his bank account on July 11 “should come right off the top.”
However, she conceded that she didn’t have any estimate of how much the former mayor had in his accounts “because this is not a debtor that is remotely forthcoming,”
Complaints over Giuliani’s lack of transparency have been a pattern throughout the seven-months-long case — from creditors, and now the judge.
When he threw out the case, the judge wrote: “The lack of financial transparency is particularly troubling given concerns that Mr Giuliani has engaged in self-dealing and that he has potential conflicts of interest that would hamper the administration of his bankruptcy case.”
Since the dismissal paused the other lawsuits he faces, creditors are now free to restart their cases against Giuliani in their respective venues.
Noelle Dunphy, Giuliani’s former employee-turned-sexual assault accuser, asked the New York Court judge overseeing her case on July 15 to “place this matter back on the active calendar” at the “earliest convenient date.”
