As the Trump administration winds down, the criminal investigations surrounding the Trump organization's finances are heating up.
According to the Washington Post, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance has asked global advisory firm FTI Consulting to provide forensic accounting expertise as part of the office's investigation to determine what if any improprieties have taken place within the Trump organization.
This is the latest step in an investigation opened into the outgoing president's finances in 2018, which started to probe whether Trump or his organization made alleged hush-money payments to two women who claimed to have affairs with the President in the years before his administration.
According to the Washington Post, Vance's investigation has now broadened to include bank, tax, and insurance fraud as new areas of interest for the prosecutor's office. The prosecutor has contracted with FTI Consulting to scrutinize the Trump organization's property deals and to determine whether the company manipulated the value of certain assets in its portfolio to reap beneficial tax breaks and interest rates, Washington Post reported after speaking to an anonymous source with inside knowledge of the investigation.
"We help clients protect their enterprise value by quantifying damages and providing expert testimony in intellectual property, professional malpractice, lost profits, valuations, breach of contract, purchase price disagreements, business interruption, environmental claims, construction claims and fraud cases; employing forensic accounting and complex modeling expertise to unravel complex financial transactions; independently gathering and analyzing critical information; and offering industry‐leading electronic evidence services that identify, collect and preserve relevant, structured information and analyze complex enterprise data," FTI Consulting writes on its website.
The move in retaining FTI Consulting might be an effort to blunt accusations that the investigation is political in nature, Jazon Zirkle of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners told the Washington Post. Zirkle said with the inclusion of an outside advisor, Vance could credibly argue "We've gotten with a global advisory firm . . . that can come in and take an objective look at this, and we're outsourcing everything to them in the way of the analysis so that it doesn't look like we're just going after Donald Trump."
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