Trump fined $10,000 daily until he complies with investigators
A New York judge on Monday ordered former US President Donald Trump to pay $10,000 a day until he agrees to hand over accounting and tax documents as part of a civil investigation into his companies.
“This is a huge victory, a court ruled in our favor to convict Donald Trump of obstruction,” New York State Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, wrote on Twitter.
The former president “must pay $10,000 per day as long as he continues to defy the court order to turn over documents to my office,” said James, who has spent years investigating possible fraud in the Trump Organization’s tax practices.
On February 17, the prosecutor got a New York judge to order the Republican tycoon and his children Donald Jr. and Ivanka to testify under oath in the framework of this investigation, a decision against which the Trumps appealed.
The court had also requested before March 31 a series of accounting and tax documents on the Trump Organization.
Facing no response, James reappeared before the New York State Supreme Court to ask that Trump be found liable for “obstruction for his refusal to comply with a court order.”
The New York attorney general’s office suspects that the Trump Organization “fraudulently” inflated the value of his real estate by applying for bank loans and understated him to authorities to pay less taxes.
In addition to this investigation, which is taking place in the civilian sphere, a separate criminal investigation was opened in Manhattan into possible financial fraud within the Trump group.
