[MistyTiger]

It's too bad Trump has not been indicted yet. But we see what is going on from the financial information NY got on Trump's properties and holdings. Trump will be in trouble soon enough.

We do know one more thing that we didn't know before. He gifted a 1.5 million dollar apartment on Park Ave to Ivanka. She said she earned the apartment in her book. She lied. She even got a discount on the pricing. There is price manipulation here.

In her 2009 book, The Trump Card, Ivanka Trump boasted about how she bought her own apartment after graduating from college. Sure, it was a unit in her father’s Trump Park Avenue, but she didn’t “benefit from an insider price,” she wrote. Except, Ivanka did get an insider price—on multiple occasions, according to an analysis of property records and recently released court filings connected to the New York attorney general’s ongoing investigation of the Trump Organization.

The first deal, which Forbes has previously reported, involved a two-bedroom apartment that Ivanka bought for $1.5 million a few months out of college. She paid $968 per square foot, while other buyers in the building were paying an average of roughly $1,670 per square foot. Stretched over 1,549 square feet, that added up to about a $1.1 million discount.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexand ... 146b1379be

New court filings reveal a second deal. In 2011, Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner, heir to another real estate fortune, had a child. That same year, Ivanka started renting a bigger unit from her father, a penthouse in the same building. As part of the agreement, Ivanka also got an option to purchase the place for $8.5 million, according to a filing released last week. She does not appear to have ever exercised the option.

But the offer gave her a chance to take advantage of a second major discount. Court records suggest the exact unit was penthouse 28, a 4,164-square foot apartment. Another penthouse with the same square footage had sold for $10.2 million in the building a handful of months earlier. If you assume that Ivanka’s apartment was worth the same amount as the other unit, then the option apparently gave her the right to buy the place from her father for $1.7 million less than its true value.

It’s worth noting that, according to court records, the Trump Organization’s own documents valued the apartment at $20.8 million, which would have made Ivanka’s option even sweeter. But the truth is, the place probably wasn’t worth that much money, as other sales in the building make clear. The $20.8 million figure appears to be a puffed-up number in line with others Donald Trump tossed around to make himself look richer than he really is.

In 2017, penthouse 28 sold for $15.9 million. That price fell far short of the numbers Trump had been listing on his balance sheet, but it was still well above normal rates for the building. In fact, since 2005, nothing else in Trump Park Avenue had sold for as much per square foot. The deal, which closed just one month after Donald Trump took office, sparked conflict-of-interest concerns. The buyer was a woman named Angela Chen, who ran a company that helped businesses expand in China and bragged on its website about its “extensive network of relationships with the highest levels of government officials.”
On paper, the sale didn’t seem to involve Ivanka. Property records listed the seller as Trump Park Avenue LLC, a company in which Donald Trump maintained a 99.9% interest. (The General Electric Pension Trust, a previous owner in the entity, sold all but 0.1% of its stake in 2004, maintaining the last sliver for tax reasons, according to a GE spokesperson.) Donald Trump counted the full proceeds of the sale as his own income on a personal financial disclosure report he filed with government officials.

It wasn’t until 2019 that anyone seemed to realize that Ivanka and Jared had a connection to that particular unit. Even then, it looked like they just rented it from Ivanka’s father. The fact that Ivanka apparently had an interest in the property, via the option, remained a secret until last week, when the New York attorney general submitted new court filings.

The newly unveiled arrangement makes the deal with Chen even more mysterious than it already was. If Ivanka had the ability to purchase the apartment for $8.5 million and Chen agreed to buy it for $15.9 million, why didn’t Ivanka exercise her option, pay her father $8.5 million, then immediately sell to Chen for a $7.4 million profit? For a family looking to pass down a multibillion-dollar fortune to the next generation, such a move would seem like a no-brainer. Yet, the records indicate that it was Donald Trump who sold the apartment to Chen rather than Ivanka Trump.

Perhaps the option had expired by 2017. Or maybe there was some sort of hidden arrangement, whereby Ivanka shared in the proceeds of the sale, even though the paperwork suggests otherwise. Neither Ivanka Trump nor the Trump Organization responded to a list of questions about the transaction.


There is a strange twist to all this business involving Ivanka’s apartments. The sweetheart deals that Donald Trump granted his daughter have soured in recent years. The elder Trump’s politics have turned off so many New Yorkers that the value of condos in his buildings have tumbled. Since mid-2015, when Trump declared his candidacy for president, prices in Trump Park Avenue have dropped an estimated 68%, even though condo sales in the rest of Manhattan are up roughly 10%.

That means that Ivanka’s first apartment is now worth an estimated $2.4 million, $900,000 more than she paid for it but about $200,000 less than its value at the time of the purchase. The penthouse is worth an estimated $9.2 million, $700,000 above the price of the option but roughly $1 million less than it was worth when Ivanka first received that option.

In other words, if Ivanka had struck deals at fair-market rates, like she suggested in her book, she likely would have lost money on her initial apartment. And the option to buy the penthouse, even if she were able to still exercise it, would now be worthless.