A former Deutsche Bank risk management officer said that while his bank did not do “full appraisals” of former President Donald Trump’s properties when issuing loans totaling more than $200 million in 2011 and 2012, it did give the numbers a “sanity check.”
“I think the phrase we used might have been ‘sanity checks’ on the numbers,” banker Nicholas Haigh testified Wednesday during New York Attorney General Letitia James' civil trial against the former president for fraud, The Associated Press reported.
Haigh’s testimony involved Trump’s “statements of financial condition” needed to obtain a $125 million loan in 2011 for his Florida Doral golf resort and a $107 million 2012 loan for his Chicago hotel and condo.
Haigh testified that the banks gave significant ”haircuts” to the appraisal numbers submitted by Trump and his organization on his Trump Tower skyscraper in New York city and his various golf courses.
The banker led the financial institution’s risk division between 2008-2018, the report said.
In earlier testimony Tuesday, Trump finance chief Allen Weisselberg said the information in the financial statements was “not always accurate.”
Trump denies any wrongdoing in the case and said that the loan contracts included a clause where it was up to the lending institution to do it’s own due diligence and verify the worth before issuing the loans.
"It’s like a ‘buyer beware’ clause,” he told reporters in the courthouse hallway last week. Trump has claimed that banks he did business with weren’t harmed, made lots of money in his deals and “to this day have no complaints.”
According to the report, Haigh said during his testimony that the bank would not issue such loans unless there was a “strong financial guarantee” from Trump who acted as guarantor for the loans.
He also testified that he reviewed the statements before approving the loans and did not find any reason to doubt their validity.
“I assumed that the representations of the assets and liabilities were broadly accurate,” Haigh said of Trump’s financial statements. “As the ultimate decider, I needed to be comfortable with the terms of the loan, including the covenants that protected the bank.”
While Trump claimed in his documents that he was worth $4.3 billion, Deutsche Bank listed his worth at $2.4 billion in an internal credit report.
As a condition for the loan, the bank required Trump to keep his worth at $2.4 billion absent any value from his celebrity, the report said.
Charles Kim ✉
Charles Kim, a Newsmax general assignment writer, is an award-winning journalist with more than 30 years in reporting on news and politics.
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