No one is above the law:…

After about two days of deliberation, the jury found the company guilty of all 17 counts. The verdict will be announced on January 13, 2023.

Former US President Donald Trump’s real estate company trump He was convicted at trial in New York of, among other things, tax fraud. After about two days of deliberations, the jury found the company guilty on all 17 counts, Manhattan attorney Alvin Bragg reported Tuesday. The verdict will be announced on January 13, 2023. Former President Trump has not been charged personally.

However, according to Bragg, this is his group’s first criminal conviction. “This was a trial of greed and fraud,” said Bragg. In Manhattan, no corporation is above the law. New York State Attorney General, Letitia JamesHe said, “We cannot tolerate people or organizations breaking the law to line their own pockets.” Lawyers for the Trump Organization said they would appeal.

CFO’s longtime recognition

In addition to the Trump Organization and other Trump Inc. defendants, the group’s longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, has already pleaded guilty. He had testified that he and other employees had systematically defrauded the tax authorities for years. Monetary assets such as luxury cars and expensive apartments were not taxed. By his own admission, the 75-year-old escaped a possible prison sentence of up to 15 years. Instead, he was ordered to pay nearly $2 million in outstanding taxes and fines and received five months in jail and an additional five years of probation.

The Trump Organization and another company accused in the group could face a fine of up to $1.7 million. While the amount shouldn’t particularly hurt the company, the group’s image could suffer severely. And Trump himself could hurt the ruling, too. When he entered the White House in January 2017, the former president announced that he was stepping down as chairman of his multinational group of companies. He passed this on to Weisselberg and his sons Don Jr. and Eric Trump.

Trump wants to run for president again

Three weeks ago, Trump announced that he would run again as the Republican candidate in the 2024 presidential election. But after his party’s poor performance in the US midterm elections, he is considered politically weak. Trump, who has loudly intervened in the campaign with extreme positions and popular support for right-wing candidates, has also been blamed by his party colleagues for the fact that Republicans have won fewer congressional seats in the so-called midterm elections than was the case in the past. widely expected. His party was unable to regain a majority in the US Senate and ended up ahead of the Democrats in the distribution of seats in the House of Representatives.

Trump is fighting legal battles on several fronts. Shortly before his presidency ended, angry Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021, after a presidential rally, as Congress had just declared his Democratic rival the election winner. Joe Biden He wanted to be officially sealed. commission of inquiry in The Congress Still working on the attack on the Capitol.

Trouble for Trump threatens elsewhere: FBI federal police searched his Mar-a-Lago property on Aug. 8 and seized, among other things, classified and sometimes top-secret documents. Because Trump kept government papers, some of which are under strict protection because of their sensitive content, on his private property, there have been investigations into whether he may have broken the law. Trump denies the allegations and describes the authorities’ actions against him as a politically motivated attempt to deny him another presidency.

(APA/DBA)