President Donald Trump on Wednesday shrugged off a New York Times investigation that concluded he made his fortune with the help of more than $400 million from his parents, partly through “dubious tax schemes” and sometimes “outright fraud.”
Trump has often boasted that he built a multi-billion dollar real estate empire from a small loan from his father, Fred, himself a prominent New York builder.
But the Times reviewed a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records that it said showed he actually received $413 million in today’s money, in part through schemes to avoid taxes.
“They used the concept of ‘time value of money’ in doing a very old, boring and often told hit piece on me,” Trump tweeted.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said he has directed the city’s finance department to investigate Trump paid appropriate taxes on hundreds of millions of dollars he inherited from his father.
The Times story said that from the time Trump was a toddler, his father funneled millions of dollars to his four children through a sham corporation to avoid gift taxes.
The records also indicate that Trump helped his father take millions more in improper tax deductions, the Times said.
The investigation also revealed Trump helped devise a scheme that undervalued his parent’s real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars, sharply reducing taxes on those properties when they were transferred to their children, according to the paper.
A lawyer for Trump, Charles Harder, called the account “100 percent false, and highly defamatory.”
“There was no fraud or tax evasion by anyone. The facts upon which The Times bases its false allegations are extremely inaccurate,” he added.
“President Trump had virtually no involvement whatsoever with these matters.”
Forbes magazine, meanwhile, estimated Trump’s fortune at $3.1 billion – the same as last year, but a third smaller than it was in 2015. Forbes ranked Trump’s fortune at 259 in the world, down from 248 the year he was elected president.