Former President Donald Trump has faced a crisis in bank lending for his business operations. The Trump Organization was the company behind "The Apprentice" and business leaders clamored to "win" a competition that would legitimize their careers. Now it's Trump who needs help appearing trustworthy to anyone who can lend him money and he's going to a few odd places searching for capital.
According to NBC News, Trump Tower was refinanced with a $100 million loan from Axos Financial, an obscure internet-only bank in San Diego and Las Vegas, financial documents from New York City's municipality revealed. According to those documents, the loan was made just days after an auditor from the Trump Organization quit, claiming that none of the financial statements for the past 10 years could be trusted.
Trump has filed for bankruptcy six times for five different companies. Despite being a former president of the United States, banks don't want to lend to Trump anymore. Axos, however, stepped up, and they aren't a stranger to different kinds of loans.
Ivanka Trump is accused of turning over false information to Deutsche Bank for loans prior to Jan. 2017, the New York Attorney General alleged.
"Axos has teamed up with nonbank lenders on loans to small businesses that carried cripplingly high double- and triple-digit effective annual interest rates," reported NBC, citing loan documents. "The bank has also specialized in loans to foreign nationals, internal documents and its website state, and has offered a type of loan that allows borrowers who paid cash for a property to turn around and instantly take money out. Such loans may pose money laundering risks, banking analysts say."
They're also involved in a lawsuit with two former employees who had questions about the way Axos was conducting its lending operations. One of those, Jennifer Brear Brinker, worked in the company's Risk Management and Compliance Department. She alleges that Axos intentionally understaffs the compliance team "in an effort to conceal its failure to comply with federal banking regulations" and contends she was terminated in January 2021 while completing a report highlighting deficiencies at Axos including "significant issues in the bank's anti-money laundering practices."
Axos denies it.
They're also facing a former auditor in court later this month. Charles Erhart alleges he was fired after he had concerns about the lending practices.
New York Times financial investigative reporter Dean Enrich told MSNBC last year that Trump was under the gun to find some cash to pay off some massive loans coming due after his presidency.
"There are both civil and criminal and congressional investigations that are still seeking after years of trying to get trump's financial records from Deutsche Bank and, you know, it's anyone's guess what that is going to show," said Enrich, who wrote Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction. "We know at Deutsche Bank, though, there were employees who raised money laundering concerns in both the Trump and [Jared] Kushner accounts. We still don't have the full story about what happened there."
