Whiny guy logs on

This, of course, means there's a story out.  I'll see if I can find it.

Ah, here it is:

When his skyscraper proved a disappointment, Donald Trump defaulted on his loans, sued his bank, got much of the debt forgiven — and largely avoided paying taxes on it.

[...]

The financial crisis was in full swing when Donald J. Trump traveled to Chicago in late September 2008 to mark the near-completion of his 92-floor skyscraper.

The fortunes of big companies, small businesses and millions of Americans — including the Trumps — were in peril.

[...]

He and his family hoped the Trump International Hotel & Tower would cement their company’s reputation as one of the world’s marquee developers of luxury real estate.

[...]

It was the biggest thing Mr. Trump ever built. It was also the last.

[...]

[T]he skyscraper became another disappointment in a portfolio filled with them. Construction lagged. Condos proved hard to sell. Retail space sat vacant.

Yet for Mr. Trump and his company, the Chicago experience also turned out to be something else: the latest example of his ability to strong-arm major financial institutions and exploit the tax code to cushion the blow of his repeated business failures.

  NYT

That last line set him off, I'm sure.

The president’s federal income tax records, obtained by The New York Times, show for the first time that, since 2010, his lenders have forgiven about $287 million in debt that he failed to repay. The vast majority was related to the Chicago project.

The New York Times has been getting a lot of mileage out of those tax records. No doubt this isn't the last story they'll dig up.

When the project encountered problems, he tried to walk away from his huge debts. [...] [R]ather than warring with a notoriously litigious and headline-seeking client, lenders cut Mr. Trump slack — exactly what he seemed to have been counting on.

Big banks and hedge funds gave him years of extra time to repay his debts. Even after Mr. Trump sued his largest lender, accusing it of preying on him, the bank agreed to lend him another $99 million — more than twice as much as was previously known — so that he could pay back what he still owed the bank on the defaulted Chicago loan, records show.

Here's another idea: he may have been privy to some bank's money laundering deals, as he himself was intimately involved with Russian mobsters. They may not have been as worried about being sued by Trump as being exposed. Just a thought.

Those forgiven debts are now part of a broader investigation of Mr. Trump’s business by the New York attorney general. They normally would have generated a big tax bill, since the Internal Revenue Service treats canceled debts as income. Yet as has often happened in his long career, Mr. Trump appears to have paid almost no federal income tax on that money, in part because of large losses in his other businesses.

[...]

To pay for the construction [of the Chicago tower], Mr. Trump arranged for two of his L.L.C.s, 401 North Wabash Venture — named for the project’s address — and its parent company, 401 Mezz Venture, to borrow more than $700 million.

Mr. Trump went to his longtime lender, Deutsche Bank, for the bulk of the money. Since 1998, he had borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars from the German bank. It had been so eager to establish a foothold in the United States that it had overlooked his history of defaults.

Again, I might mention the money laundering. But, go on...

Mr. Trump assured Deutsche Bank officials, including Justin Kennedy, the son of the now-retired Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy, [...]

Sorry to interrupt again...ever wonder why Anthony Kennedy stepped down?

[...] that the Chicago development was a guaranteed moneymaker. In a sign of the Trump family’s commitment to the project, Mr. Trump told his bankers that his daughter Ivanka would be in charge.

[...]

Mr. Trump agreed to personally guarantee $40 million of the [$640 million] loan. If his L.L.C. were to default, Deutsche Bank could collect that money directly from Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump also went to Fortress Investment Group, a hedge fund and private equity company, for $130 million. This was a so-called mezzanine loan, which meant that it would be repaid only after the Deutsche Bank debt had been satisfied. Because of the greater risk, the Fortress loan came with a double-digit interest rate. The agreement with Fortress also required Mr. Trump’s 401 Mezz Venture to pay a $49 million “exit fee” when it repaid the loan.

If Mr. Trump defaulted, his lenders could seize the building.

Deutsche Bank and Fortress both planned to chop up the loans and sell at least some of the pieces. Deutsche Bank sold them mostly to American, European and Asian banks, Fortress mostly to private equity and hedge funds, including Dune Capital Management, which had recently been co-founded by Steven Mnuchin, the future Treasury secretary.

Hmmmm, you don't suppose Steve Mnuchin has some shady financial issues, do you?

The loans were due in May 2008.

[...]

Work on the project went more slowly than planned, and the residential portion was still under construction as the loans came due.

With the financial crisis enveloping the world, finding buyers for multimillion-dollar apartments suddenly became much harder. In the spring of 2008, Mr. Trump asked Deutsche Bank to delay the loan’s due date. The bank gave him an extra six months.

In mid-September, the crisis crescendoed with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. Financial markets went haywire.

How well we remember those days.

At that point, at least 159 units in the building were still unsold, and many more were under contract but hadn’t closed, according to New York court records. That meant hundreds of millions of dollars that Mr. Trump and his family had counted on to repay Deutsche Bank and Fortress hadn’t yet materialized. And the loans were due in barely six weeks.

Mr. Trump sought another extension. This time, Deutsche Bank said no.

Mr. Trump’s company still owed Deutsche Bank about $334 million in principal and interest, and Fortress $130 million, not including interest and fees.

Mr. Trump went on the offensive. In a letter to Deutsche Bank on Nov. 4, he accused it of helping ignite the financial crisis. This was important, because Mr. Trump went on to claim that the crisis constituted a “force majeure” — an act of God, like a natural disaster — that entitled him to extra time to repay the loans.

A few days later, Mr. Trump and his companies sued Deutsche Bank and Fortress, along with the other banks and hedge funds that had purchased pieces of the loans.

Which crooked lawyer did he have then?

Deutsche Bank soon filed its own lawsuit, accusing its longtime client of being a habitual deadbeat and demanding immediate repayment of the now-defaulted loans.

Inside Deutsche Bank, angry executives and lawyers vowed to never again do business with Mr. Trump, according to senior executives.

Did Kennedy's son suffer any blowback?

Why didn’t the lenders seize the building?

Going to court to take over the unfinished skyscraper promised to be a costly, yearslong process, especially given Mr. Trump’s reputation for using the legal system to drag out fights and grind down opponents. It seemed simpler to resolve the dispute.

On July 28, 2010, lawyers for Mr. Trump, Deutsche Bank and Fortress notified the court that they had reached a private settlement. The terms weren’t disclosed.

[...]

Mr. Trump was let off the hook for about $270 million. It was the type of generous financial break that few American companies or individuals could ever expect to receive, especially without filing for bankruptcy protection.

[...]

Fortress and its partners — including Mr. Mnuchin’s Dune Capital, as well as Cerberus Capital Management, whose co-chief executive, Stephen A. Feinberg, would become a major Trump fund-raiser and go on to lead a White House advisory panel — quickly realized they wouldn’t ever collect [the] full amount.

Ultimately, Fortress settled for $48 million, which Mr. Trump wired to the firm in March 2012.

[...]

Fortress had expected to receive more than $300 million.

[...]

In many ways, it repeated a pattern that had played out more than a decade earlier at Mr. Trump’s Atlantic City casinos: a cycle of defaulting on debts and then persuading already-burned lenders to cut him a break.

Don't try this at home.

Trump’s companies got a pass on the money they owed on the Deutsche Bank loan, too.

[...]

By 2012, the Trump Organization had drummed up about $235 million to repay the financial institutions to whom Deutsche Bank had sold pieces of the original loan. They included banks and asset managers in the United States, Germany, Ireland and China, according to court records.

But Mr. Trump still owed $99 million, according to people familiar with the debt. Where would he come up with that money?

Though Deutsche Bank had vowed to do no more business with Mr. Trump, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, introduced him to his personal wealth manager at the bank, Rosemary Vrablic. Ms. Vrablic, with the support of her superiors, soon agreed to restart the relationship with Mr. Trump.

Rosemary should be lawyering up and preparing for testimony. Oh wait, she already is. 

 "Ms. Vrablic was thrust into the spotlight when Mr. Trump boasted to The Times in 2016 about his strong relationship with Deutsche Bank — and inflated Ms. Vrablic’s role at the bank. “Why don’t you call the head of Deutsche Bank? Her name is Rosemary Vrablic,” he said in the interview. “She is the boss.”"

[O]ne wing of Deutsche Bank was providing Mr. Trump the money to repay another division of the same bank.

[...]

Ms. Vrablic’s team also lent Mr. Trump’s company $125 million for work on his Doral golf resort in Florida and up to $170 million to transform the Old Post Office building in Washington into a luxury hotel. Mr. Trump personally guaranteed those loans, too.

[...]

The following spring, the Trump Organization repaid $54 million, according to a person briefed on the matter and Cook County records. That left $45 million outstanding. But in 2014, Deutsche Bank agreed to lend another $24 million on the property and to extend the due date until 2024, records show. Mr. Trump now owed the bank $69 million. By May 2016, he had repaid the $24 million.

[...]

Because they counted as investments in his business for tax purposes, the guarantees increased the amount of losses he could use to avoid income taxes in the future. Mr. Trump’s federal tax returns show that he has personally guaranteed the repayment of $421 million in debts.

Don't try that at home either.

At the end of 2018, Mr. Trump and his companies owed the bank $330 million.

The I.R.S. requires taxpayers to treat forgiven debts as income when calculating what they owe in federal taxes. The New York attorney general, Letitia James, is investigating whether Mr. Trump followed the law.

The tax records reviewed by The Times show that while Mr. Trump accounted for $287 million of income from his canceled debts, he managed to avoid paying income taxes on nearly all of it.

Mr. Trump reported $40 million of forgiven debt as income in 2010. But losses from his businesses — including $30.8 million in red ink on the Chicago project — meant he had no taxable income that year.

[...]

He would generally have been entitled to write off the total amount he spent on a building over a number of years, a process known as depreciation. Instead, he agreed to reduce those eventual write-offs by $104.8 million, an alternative allowed in tax law.

For the other $141 million, Mr. Trump took advantage of a law, passed after the 2008 financial crisis, that allowed income from canceled debts to be deferred for five years and then spread out over the next five. Each year from 2014 through 2018, Mr. Trump declared $28.2 million of canceled-debt income.

As it turned out, though, losses in other parts of his business wiped out most of his federal tax bill on that income. He paid nothing for 2014; $641,931 for 2015; and, after credits, only $750 a year for 2016 and 2017. It isn’t clear how much he paid for 2018.

[...]

[The Chicago] skyscraper’s fortunes have withered. Most of its retail space has never been occupied, The Real Deal reported last year. Its revenue declined from $67 million in 2014 to $50 million in 2018, while profits plunged from $16.3 million to $1.8 million over the same period.

The problems intensified in 2020, as the coronavirus forced restaurants, including Mr. Trump’s in Chicago, to close. The Trump family sought financial relief from Deutsche Bank among others.

The bank offered to let Mr. Trump’s companies pause interest payments on their loans. The Trump Organization decided the bank’s proposal was insufficiently generous and turned it down.

The loans come due in 2023 and 2024.

At which time, if he's not behind bars (and probably even if he is), he'll arrange some other dubious deal.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.