Trump's Business Empire at Risk of Dissolution After Ruling

What You Need to Know

New York’s attorney general has been authorized to cancel the certificates for Trump companies that hold assets with inflated values.
The Trump Organization is comprised of some 500 different entities, and the scope of a New York judge’s order affecting them remains unclear.

Donald Trump rode down the escalator at Trump Tower to announce he was running for president in 2015. The Fifth Avenue skyscraper had long served as the backdrop to his business success story, which in turn became the foundation for his rise in politics.

Now his control over that property and others could be in jeopardy.

The New York judge who ruled on Tuesday that the former president committed fraud by inflating the value of many of his assets also authorized state Attorney General Letitia James to cancel certificates for companies that hold those assets.

Judge Arthur Engoron said James, who sued Trump last year, could seek an order as well barring him and his companies from continuing to conduct business in New York.

At a Wednesday hearing, Engoron gave Trump and James 30 days to recommend the names of potential independent receivers to oversee the dissolution of those companies.

The Trump Organization is comprised of some 500 different entities, and the scope of Engoron’s order remains unclear.

Christopher Kise, a lawyer for Trump, asked the judge if all of the Trump entities face dissolution.

Engoron said the parties and the receiver would “work it out.”

Kise suggested that Barbara Jones, a retired federal judge who was previously appointed as an independent monitor in the case, could serve as receiver, and lawyers from the attorney general’s office expressed openness to the idea.

Kise on Tuesday called Engoron’s order “outrageous”and said an appeal was forthcoming.

“While the full impact of the decision remains unclear, what is clear is that President Trump and his family will seek all available appellate remedies to rectify this miscarriage of justice,” Kise said.

Losing certificates would mean Trump could no longer do business in New York as he had before, said Janet Sabel, a former chief deputy at the state attorney general’s office. “But exactly how that plays out and what happens to his assets remains to be decided,” she said.

A number of properties whose value Trump inflated are located outside New York, including his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, and his Aberdeen golf course in Scotland, raising the possibility that they could be transferred to non-New York entities.

But many of his most valuable assets remain in the state where he was born and where he first rose to fame, including Trump Tower, the office building at 40 Wall Street and the Seven Springs estate in Westchester County.

Here are some of the properties cited in Engoron’s order:

Trump Tower “Triplex”

The judge said Trump engaged in fraud by repeatedly claiming that his 10,996 square foot penthouse apartment in Manhattan was nearly three times bigger than that in reality, even after the Trump Organization was put on notice by a magazine reporter that the value was inflated.

Trump’s annual statements of financial condition used the false square footage to inflate his net worth by as much as $207 million. In 2012, when Trump valued the penthouse at a “staggering” $180 million, no apartment sold in New York City had “ever approached” that price, the judge said.