New York Attorney General Letitia James has filed a motion to block Donald Trump and his business from moving assets to evade liability after her office launched a blockbuster lawsuit alleging widespread fraud within the Trump Organization.
The filing requests that Trump and his associates must first get court approval before transferring assets to another entity. She also is requesting a court-appointed independent monitor to oversee that compliance.
Ms James also is seeking the court’s permission to serve the former president and his son Eric Trump electronically, “as both defendants and their counsels have refused to accept service of the complaints for almost a month,” according to a statement from her office.
“Our investigation uncovered the fact that Donald Trump and the Trump Organization engaged in significant fraud to inflate his personal net worth by billions of dollars to illegally enrich himself and cheat the system,” Ms James said in a statement on 13 October.
“Since we filed this sweeping lawsuit last month, Donald Trump and the Trump Organization have continued those same fraudulent practices and taken measures to evade responsibility,” she added. “We are seeking an immediate stop to these actions because Mr Trump should not get to play by different rules.”
A high-stakes civil lawsuit filed by Ms James’s office on 21 September alleges that the former president, his three eldest children, his business empure and associates worked to falsely inflate the value of his net woth by billions of dollars to gain tax benefits and other benefits from insurers and financial institutions.
The suit is the result of a three-year investigation allegedly revealing how Mr Trump “cheated all of us” by inflating his net worth “to unjustly enrich himself and to cheat the system”, she said from New York last month.
After the Trump Organization became aware of the investigation, Mr Trump and his associates have “continued to use many practices they knew to be improper or fraudulent” – including a 2021 statement of financial condition, according to Ms James’s office.
The organisation “appears to be taking steps to restructure its business to evade the reaches” of the lawsuit, according to her office.
The same day the suit was filed, the Trump Organization registered a new entity with the New York Secretary of State titled “Trump Organization II LLC.”
“That entity is a foreign corporation that was incorporated in Delaware,” according to Ms James’s office. “The Trump Organization has since refused to provide any assurance that it will not seek to move assets out of New York to evade legal accountability.”
Mr Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.
The New York attorney general probe and subsequent lawsuit are among several facing the former president, including a criminal inquiry in Manhattan over allegations of fraud and tax evastion, a federal investigation for his alleged mishandling of sensitive White House documents at his Mar-a-Lago home, and a congressional probe into the events leading up to and surrounding the 6 January, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, mounted by a mob of his supporters.
