Deutsche Bank kept lending Donald Trump millions of dollars for years since the late 1990s, despite having been deemed a “risky” client, The New York Times reported. The outlet alleges that Deutsche Bank’s loans to Trump totalled $2 billion, also reporting that Trump could be lying about his net worth and assets.
According to the outlet, in 2003, the bank’s investment division helped sell hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of bonds for the incumbent US president’s casino company. The entity defaulted the following year and left clients with the losses; nevertheless, in 2005, Trump’s firm asked the bank for a $640 million loan to build a skyscraper in Chicago, but it also defaulted several years later and sued the bank. At the same time, the newspaper claims that he said that he was worth around $3 billion, while the bank evaluated him at $788 million.
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After the investment division stopped working with him, he continued to receive loans through private banking, according to the outlet. This process reportedly repeated itself in 2010, when the bank concluded that some of his real estate assets had been inflated by 70 percent.
The newspaper pointed out that while Deutsche Bank insisted after Trump had won the 2016 election that some senior employees had not been aware of the bank working with him, a number of executives had allegedly supported business dealings with the then president-to-be. The NYT names former Chief Executive Officer Josef Ackermann, who allegedly okayed resuming issuing loans to Trump, although he later admitted that he did not recall it, as well as his successor Anshu Jain, who is said to have visited the billionaire in Trump Tower in Manhattan, sounding “upbeat” about his financial state, according to another employee.
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According to the newspaper, the list of these contacts at Deutsche Bank also includes Mike Offit, whom the outlet describes as Trump’s “first point man” and who assisted Trump in receiving credit to renovate 40 Wall Street and construct a tower near the UN headquarters in New York in the late 1990s. However, in 1999 a forged signature was discovered on a Trump loan document and the loan was not approved.
Other executives rumoured to have built up rapport with Trump are Justin Kennedy, the son of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who reportedly helped him to get loans from the bank, and Rosemary T. Vrablic, who was hired in the private-banking division and assisted Trump in borrowing over $300 million as she had allegedly become aquatinted with the future president through another one of her clients, Jared Kushner. According to the newspaper, she is expected to testify in Congress. Neither the US president nor the White House has commented on the issue.