(Reuters) – New York State Attorney General Letitia James said on Tuesday that she is prepared to seize Donald Trump’s assets, including his skyscrapers, if he is unable to find the cash to pay off a $355 million fine from his fraud trial.
“If he does not have funds to pay off the judgment, then we will seek judgment enforcement mechanisms in court, and we will ask the judge to seize his assets,” James told ABC News.
A New York judge last week ordered Trump, the former Republican president and frontrunner for his party’s White House nomination, to pay the fine after ruling that he committed repeated and persistent fraud, overstating his net worth by as much as much as $3.6 billion a year to obtain better loan terms.
Trump denies all wrongdoing and is appealing the fine. He has accused James, an elected Democrat, of bias.
Trump’s appeal of the judgment may focus on his contention that there were no actual victims from the conduct in the case.
But James told ABC that she is confident of the strength of her case, adding that “financial frauds are not victimless crimes.”
“He engaged in this massive amount of fraud. It wasn’t just a simple mistake, a slight oversight, the variations are wildly exaggerated, and the extent of the fraud was staggering,” James said.
(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Longmont, Colorado; editing by Miral Fahmy)
