“The evidence will show the prosecutors’ entire theory of the case makes no sense.”
“So when the prosecutor said the Trump Organization did something illegal for Allen Weisselberg, what they really mean is that Allen Weisselberg did something illegal,” Necheles said. The Trump Organization lawyer Susan Necheles told the jury that the fraud scheme started with Weisselberg “and it ended with Allen Weisselberg”. It was only then that the companies “finally had to clean up these fraudulent tax practices”.īut defense attorneys for the organization asserted that blame for Weisselberg’s tax fraud lay solely with him.
But even after Trump was inaugurated as president in 2017 and the companies placed in a trust, she said, they “were still effectively owned by Donald Trump”. “We all know that corporations aren’t people – they can’t think or act on their own,” Hoffinger argued. From 2005 to 2017, “when most of the criminal conduct occurred”, the prosecutor noted, these companies were “owned by Donald Trump”. Hoffinger said that evidence would show that Weisselberg’s fraud implicates the Trump corporations, the Trump Organization and Trump Payroll Corp. The court will hear from key former executive and prosecution witness Allen Weisselberg, the former chief financial officer at the Trump Organization, who has separately already pleaded guilty to 15 counts of tax fraud. “This case is about greed and cheating – cheating on taxes,” prosecutor Susan Hoffinger said during an opening statement, as the Manhattan district attorney’s office began to build its case. The case could land the Trump Organization’s sprawl of 500 business entities with a criminal conviction that will make it harder for the former president’s company to do business.
Greed corp empire trial#
The seminal trial in New York got truly under way on Monday with prosecutors arguing that the company fraudulently evaded tax by paying a key executive $1.76m through such perks as a free apartment, a leased Mercedes and tuition fees for his grandchildren.
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