Posted on 02/14/22
| News Source: Arutz-7
The Trump Organization’s accounting firm, Mazars, says a decade of financial statements for former President Donald Trump cannot be relied upon and that it won’t do any new work for the company, Bloomberg News reported on Monday.
Mazars had notified Alan Garten, the chief lawyer for the Trump Organization, of its decision last week in a letter, the report said.
New York Attorney General Letitia James said the development showed the urgency of her civil fraud investigation and included the Mazars letter in a court filing Monday urging a judge to order Trump to comply with her subpoena and document requests.
The state of New York is investigating what it says was a pattern of potential fraud involving the manipulation of valuations of key Trump properties.
The probe by James, a Democrat, is one of several by law enforcement into Trump’s businesses,
Mazars said in the letter, dated February 9, that it decided to sever ties to Trump after conducting its own investigation and based on filings by the attorney general in January. The firm said it did not conclude the financial statements, from the years 2011 to 2020, contained material discrepancies, but decided that the “totality of circumstances” were at a point where it faced a conflict of interest with the Trump Organization.
“As a result, we are not able to provide any new work product for the Trump Organization,” Mazars said in the letter, according to Bloomberg.
The firm declined a request for additional comment in a prepared statement, citing client confidentiality. A lawyer for Trump and a representative of the company didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
James recently issued subpoenas for Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump as part of the probe, requesting testimony and documents “in connection with an investigation into the valuation of properties owned or controlled by Donald J. Trump or the Trump Organization, or any matter which the Attorney General deems pertinent thereto.”
She said in a court filing that neither was cooperating. The Trump Organization charged that the subpoenas were not properly issued.
Last month, Trump asked a federal judge in New York to throw out the probe into his company, arguing that the probe is a “targeted attack against a political adversary” by James, who is a Democrat.