For a decade the Mazars Company provided accounting services for Trump and the Trump Organization. The services included preparing Statements of Financial Condition, crucial documents for securing loans as they assure creditors the party seeking the loan is a low financial risk. Today Mazars issued a statement that remarkably said the following:
1. The financial statements we prepared for Trump are unreliable.
2. It’s not our fault. We did everything professionally.
Put together that’s effectively a statement, from Trump’s own accountants, that Trump misled his own accountants. They are saying Trump lied to them when giving them information they relied upon when preparing their reports, which creditors then relied upon. The legal term for this is bank fraud.
The Mazars statement made clear it came to this conclusion based on “filings made by the New York Attorney General on January 18, 2022, our own investigation, and information received from internal and external sources.”
You can read the January 18 NYAG filing HERE. The 115 page document goes into great detail enumerating facts showing that the Trump Organization made “misstatements to counterparties, including financial institutions, and the Internal Revenue Service.” In that regards, it also states that Trump “had ultimate authority over a wide swath of conduct by the Trump Organization” associated with those “misstatements.”
However, it is significant that Mazars explicitly states that this action is the result of its own investigation and other information “from internal and external sources.” You can bet the NYAG will be following up on that.
There is a third major statement from Mazars:
3. If you relied on our financial statements, you shouldn’t.
In their own words:
“We write to advise that the Statements of Financial Condition for Donald J. Trump for the years ending June 30, 2011 — June 30, 2020, should no longer be relied upon and you should inform any recipients thereof who are currently relying upon one or more of those documents that those documents should not be relied upon.”
Put simply this is notice to any number of Trump’s creditors that the information they based their loans to him on was false, fraudulent one might say. That folks is huge.
Every creditor that loaned Trump money based on those now worthless statements of financial condition is now completely justified to call in that loan. They will do so. It is arguably malpractice to not do so. There will be a rush to do so. The creditors have fiduciary responsibilities to their institutions, and to those whose deposits form the basis for their loans. At a minimum they are justified in demanding additional, secured collateral for the loans based upon provable, and liquid, assets.
There is another impact. While there is no accountant/client privilege accountants often do their work on the direction of an attorney so a claim of attorney work product privilege might attach. With Trump’s own accountants effectively saying it was all a fraudulent enterprise, the crime/fraud exception to attorney/client privilege will apply.
This is why Mazars had to fire (or let go as a client) the Trump Organization. Its position that Trump and the organization lied to Mazars created a conflict of interest between Mazars and Trump. In the words of Mazars:
“Due in part to our decision regarding the financial statements, as well as the totality of the circumstances, we have also reached the point such that there is a non-waivable conflict of interest with the Trump Organization. As a result, we are not able to provide any new work product to the Trump Organization.”
As a consequence Mazars gave Trump only days notice that it would not be able to do further work on his and Melania’s tax returns.
There is another point to be made. The January 18 NYAG filing was made in response to a motion to quash their subpoena against Trump. Trump claimed the NYAG was engaged in purely partisan political action against him. Now Trump’s own accountants legitimize the investigation the NYAG launched against him and the subpoenas issued pursuant to that investigation.
A former President of the United States was just fired by his own accountants because he defrauded them. Let that sink in.
