Donald Trump debt

Donald Trump: debt

Forbes

Donald Trump’s Great Escape: How The Former President Solved His Debt Crisis

The 45th president was chained to money-losing real estate and drowning in debt when he left office. Now, magically, he is flush with cash and free to deal— thanks to a little help from powerful friends.

The day Donald Trump left the White House, his business was facing $900 million of debt coming due in the next four years. Working through those loans would have been a significant undertaking for any firm, but the Trump Organization was contending with additional challenges. Deutsche Bank, Trump’s longtime lender, was reportedly looking to end its relationship with the real estate mogul. Two other financial institutions, Signature Bank and Professional Bank, had spread the word that they were cutting ties in the wake of January 6, 2021. Meanwhile, the Manhattan district attorney was getting close to charging the Trump Organization with a series of financial crimes, including falsifying business records, conspiracy and fraud.

Soon plenty of people were trumpeting the end of an era. “The indictment of the Trump Org will likely result in its destruction as a viable entity,” Richard Signorelli, a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, tweeted in June 2021. “No bank will ever do business with an indicted company,” Dan Goldman, a onetime prosecutor who served as lead counsel during Trump’s first impeachment trial, said on MSNBC, calling an indictment “almost a death blow to the Trump Organization.”

Those predictions turned out to be dead wrong. In the last 15 months, the Trump Organization—under indictment, with its founder characterizing the charges as part of a “political Witch Hunt by the Radical Left Demo­crats”—has managed to rework almost all $900 million of the debt it had coming due. Two of its most troublesome Deutsche Bank loans, totaling $295 million, are now off the books. The former president sold his money-losing hotel in Washington, D.C., to an investment shop connected to former Major League Baseball star Alex Rodriguez and retired boxing champion Floyd Mayweather, thanks to help from a firm tied to computer billionaire Michael Dell. Trump also refinanced $125 million of debt against a Miami golf resort and reworked a $100 million mortgage at Trump Tower.

Trump’s business still has plenty of debt—an estimated $1.1 billion in all—but now most of it doesn’t come due until 2028 or later. Two loans that haven’t been refinanced—a $13 million mortgage against a property on Third Avenue in Manhattan and a $45 million loan against a tower in Chicago—mature in 2024. But neither of those should be too difficult to pay back. After all, Trump now has an estimated $375 million in cash on hand, more than three times the sum he had at any point during his presidency, thanks to the spate of dealmaking.

How did he manage to pull all this off? First, he got some help from Steven Roth, his near-billionaire business partner, who has a sterling repu­tation in the real estate world. Then Trump cut a miraculous deal with a murky investment firm called CGI Merchant Group. Finally, he found a Kushner family–connected lender to replace Deutsche Bank, which for years had financed his projects and overlooked his shortcomings. “Every business in the world is completely morality-agnostic when it comes to moneymaking opportunities,” says Mike Offit, who started Deutsche Bank’s relationship with Trump in the 1990s after the future president came off a series of bankruptcies. “He’ll always have lenders. Yes, it may be expensive. But there will always be entities that will lend to him.”

• https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2022/07/29/donald-trumps-great-escape-how-the-former-president-solved-his-debt-crisis/?sh=71810dfc3970