While listless by Donald Trump’s known standards, the former president’s age-old property in the county of Westchester, upstate New York, could eventually become one of his properties. worst nightmares legally.
Seven Springs, 86 acres of nature strip that is a mansion of Georgian style, is the subject of two state investigations: a criminal investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. and a civil investigation by New York State Attorney General Letitia James.
Both investigations focus on whether Trump manipulated property value to get more tax breaks from an environmental conservation deal he struck in late 2015 when he ran for president.
Bought by Trump in 1995 for $ 7.5 millionSeven Springs was the subject of renewed analysis as the president prepared to leave office and nearly lost the legal protections he had as president. In mid-December, Vance Jr. new subpoenas and a judge ordered the delivery of evidence to Letitia James’s office nine days after Trump left Washington.
Trump’s other legal issues have already dominated headlines, including investigations into his attempts to influence election officials and payments on his behalf to women reporting various cases. But former Manhattan district attorney Duncan Levin argues that bureaucratic investigators are going where the paper trail leads.
Seven Springs, bought by Trump in 1995 for $ 7.5 million. Photo: AP
While a tax issue is related to a conservation agreement pmaybe not that sexy as payment of money in exchange for silence, prosecutors are likely to focus on any violations of the law they find, ”says Levin.
“Remember the authorities they captured Al Capone for tax evasion. “
An atypical place
Seven Springs es an atypical place in Trump’s real estate portfolio, filled with luxurious skyscrapers and gilded fixtures. Listed on their website as a family paradise, even though Trump hasn’t been there for more than four years.
The mansion
At the heart of the property is the mansion built as summer residence in 1919 by Eugene Meyer, who became Chairman of the US Federal Reserve and dueño from The Washington Post. In 2006, while pushing out a plan to build luxury homes on the property, Trump spread the idea that he and his family would move into the mansion, but that never happened.
Upon release, the home of 2,631 square meters It had more than a dozen rooms, an indoor pool, a bowling alley, and a tennis court. In 1940, Meyer’s daughter, Katharine Graham, the late editor of the Washington Post, married in Seven Springs.
Seven Springs, a 2,631 square foot mansion. Photo: AP
In her autobiography Personal Story, Katharine describes her ambivalent emotions: “The older I got, the more I hated them. the loneliness of the farmbut in my childhood, as I wrote to my father when I was 10 years old, it was ‘a beautiful old place’
At one point, Eugene Meyer owned about 285 acres. A philanthropic foundation founded by him and his wife Agnes donated 100 acres to The Nature Conservancy and the rest of the land and buildings that made up Seven Springs at Yale University in 1973, after Agnes’s death.
Ownership changed hands again when the foundation took it back from Yale and ran a conference center there before the property was transferred to Rockefeller University, which eventually sold them to Trump.
Donald Trump page unos $ 2.25 million less than Seven Springs’ list price, acquiring the land as part of an effort to revive its fortune after a series of failures in the early 1990s, including casino bankruptcies and the loss of his Trump Shuttle airline.
Chain of frustrated projects
At the time, the tycoon proposed to transform the property in his first golf course with category for championship, an exclusive clientele and very high social quota.
He hired an architectural firm to map the fairways and greens, but stopped the project when local residents raised concerns about the possibility that the lawn chemicals contaminate the neighboring Lake Byram, a local source of drinking water.
Then Trump tried build houses. He proposed building 46 single-family homes and after that plan also met community opposition, 15 country-sized homes, which he described in 2004 in terms of “ high-end residential homes, as never before on the Costa East The project was held back by lawsuits and for years no house has ever been built.
Donald Trump paid about $ 2.25 million less than Seven Springs list price. Photo: AP
In 2009, Trump caused a sensation by allowing Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi pitch your tent Bedouin style in the grounds of Seven Springs, north of New York City, as he had nowhere else to stay while visiting the UN.
Initially, Trump suggested he was unaware that Gaddafi was involved, but later admitted “made a lot of money” renting the site to the Libyan leader. The local authorities eventually stopped work on the tent, and Gaddafi eventually did not stay in it.
The fraud
Frustrated with his development plans, the former president opted for a strategy that would allow him to keep the property. lower your taxesIt supported a land conservation fund to conserve 60 acres of mature pastures and forests.
Received a deduction of $ 21 million in income tax, equal to the value of the conserved land, according to property records and courts. The amount was based on a professional appraisal evaluating Seven Springs’ entire holdings in $ 56.5 million as of December 1, 2015.
The amount was much older than estimated by local government appraisers, who reported that all properties were worth it $ 20 million
Michael Colangelo, an attorney for the New York Attorney General, at a hearing last year outlined the gist of the grant or assistance provided by Seven Springs in connection with a dispute over evidence.
“As the value of the assistance provided was not properly inflatedWho benefited from that improper increase and for what amounts? Colangelo said.
It goes without saying that the attorney general should see the data that should reflect the value of the deduction applied, which was diverted to intermediate entities and, ultimately, towards mr. trumpin person. “
A message was left to comment to Trump’s spokesman. The former Republican president has previously disqualified these investigations as part of a “witch hunt”.
The habit of manipulating values
Seven Springs caught the attention of investigators when Michael Cohen, a longtime personal attorney for Trump, told a congressional committee in 2019 that Trump was in the habit of manipulate property valuesby inflating them in some cases and minimizing them in others to access favorable loan terms and tax benefits.
Cohen testified that Trump had made financial statements worthy of Seven Springs $ 291 million in 2012. During his testimony, the attorney provided the House Oversight and Reform Committee with copies of three of Trump’s financial statements.
He also alleged that those statements, from 2011, 2012 and 2013, were the statements Trump gave to his main lender, Deutsche Bank, to request information about a loan to buy the professional football team. NFL Buffalo Bills and also to Forbes magazine to support his claim of being on the list of the richest people in the world.
While he was president, Trump stated in his annual financial disclosure forms that the property was worth it between 25 and 50 million of dollars.
The first to act was the Attorney General of New York. Letitia James sent subpoenas to Cushman & Wakefield, commercial real estate company, for data related to the valuation assignment carried out for Trump, the law firms working on the Seven Springs project, and Trump’s company, The Trump Organization, for data regarding your annual financial situation and the conservation aid granted.
Attorney General James also cited the 2019 zoning and planning records for the three communities that Seven Springs spans. In December, Cyrus Vance Jr. with its own quotes. A municipal employee says the investigators have received “boxes and boxes of documents” in response. These include tax returns, topographic surveys, environmental studies, and schedule board meeting minutes.
Letitia James’s investigators interviewed Trump’s son Eric, executive vice president of The Trump Organization and president of the limited liability company through which the company owns Seven Springs, the organization’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, and the attorneys Trump hired for the Seven Springs Project, specializing in land use and federal tax litigation.
The investigation team has not yet determined whether any laws have been violated.
Vance Jr., who is a Democrat like Prosecutor James, has not revealed much about his criminal investigation, in part because of the grand jury’s rules of secrecy. Through court documents, the office of Vance Jr. stated that it focuses on public reports of “extensive and protracted criminal behavior at the Trump Organization.”
Documents filed in connection with the criminal investigation – spurred by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last month that Vance Jr. granted access to Trump’s tax records – abarcan a Seven Springs among the possible targets.
In addition to the large mansion, Seven Springs includes a Tudor style house once owned by the ketchup magnate HJ Heinz, and coach houses smaller than Trump’s grown sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, have said they served as a “base” when they visited the farm to hike and ride ATVs.
During his presidency, Trump himself chose prestigious properties, such as his Bedminster golf course in New Jersey and his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, where he has lived since he left the White House.
The New York Times reported last year that Trump’s tax records show that he classified Seven Springs not as a personal home, but as an investment property, which allowed him to give a discount more than 2 million dollars in inheritance tax since 2014.
The author is a journalist for the Associated Press
Translation: Román García Azcárate
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