A prominent financial wizard suggests former President Donald Trump should be exonerated from his New York fraud case under a simple theory:
Everybody does it.
In a recent appearance on CNN, Canadian businessman Kevin O’Leary, best known as one of the “Shark Tank” panel of investors, denounced New York Attorney General Letitia James’ case against Trump as “ridiculous.”
Yet what seemed just as ridiculous is that at least one left-wing media personality admitted to never having heard O’Leary’s point, probably because they never sought the other side of the story.
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James charged Trump with fraud in a $370 million case, claiming he purposefully overpriced his assets to secure financing.
One gaping hole in the case is that Trump repaid all the loans, and those he allegedly defrauded never claimed he bilked them.
On CNN, O’Leary told host Laura Coates to leave Trump and politics out of the equation. Instead, he suggested, “talk about what happens in real estate development anywhere.”
He said real estate developers and lenders routinely haggle over the price of assets used as collateral for construction loans.
“You fight it out. You are always trying to show your assets in the brightest light with the sunshine you can possibly determine for them,” O’Leary told Coates. “You want them to be worth the very most because you’re only going to get a 40 to 50 percent loan to value, as it’s called.”
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“Then you borrow that money, in the case of a $500 million asset, maybe you get $250 million, and you build the new building with a construction finance loan. So that’s what this case is all about.”
O’Leary continued, “Every single real estate developer everywhere on earth does this. They always talk about their asset being worth a lot, and the bank says no. That’s just the way it is.”
In Trump’s case, he said, “Who lost money? Nobody. The bank got paid back the construction finance loan, and a new building was built.”
“If you’re going to sue this case and win, you’ve gotta sue every real estate developer everywhere. This is all they do. This is what they do all day long, every day,” O’Leary added. “This doesn’t even make sense.”
“I understand Trump has a lot of problems in other indictments and everything else,” he added, “but if you’re a real estate developer, you’re watching this and saying, ‘What is this? This is ridiculous.’”
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O’Leary chipped in that he didn’t think the case would survive Trump’s appeal if the former president lost the case, which wrapped up last week.
In response to O’Leary, Coates noted, “It’s fascinating to me to hear this perspective because you don’t often hear it from that particular angle.”
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