The Daily Fuckup

On October 11, 2023, the New York civil fraud trial returned to a familiar question: what did lenders do with Donald Trump’s financial statements, and how much did they rely on them? A retired Deutsche Bank risk management officer, Nicholas Haigh, testified that Trump’s statements of financial condition were key to loans tied to the Doral golf resort in Florida and the Chicago hotel and condo tower. Haigh also said the bank did not simply accept the figures at face value. In some cases, he said, Deutsche Bank applied its own reductions to property values and used what he described as “sanity checks” on the numbers. ([apnews.com](https://apnews.com/article/364d1052f98816121000c26dc66f3878?utm_source=openai))

That testimony mattered because it tracked the central dispute in the case: whether Trump and his company inflated asset values to make their balance sheets look stronger, and whether those figures were material to lenders. The trial at that point was still an evidentiary fight, not a final judgment on every disputed number. But the witness account gave prosecutors more material to argue that Trump’s own statements were part of the lending process, even if the bank did some independent checking of its own. ([apnews.com](https://apnews.com/article/364d1052f98816121000c26dc66f3878?utm_source=openai))

The broader record in the case had already put Trump’s financial disclosures under scrutiny. New York’s attorney general had alleged that Trump and his businesses used false or misleading statements to obtain better loan terms and other benefits, and a trial-court ruling before the testimony had already found that some of those statements were fraudulent. The later 2025 appellate decision described the same lending relationships and confirmed that the Deutsche Bank loans were among the transactions at issue. ([ag.ny.gov](https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2022/attorney-general-james-sues-donald-trump-years-financial-fraud?utm_source=openai))

For Trump, the damaging part was not just that the bank reviewed his numbers, but that his own financial statements were part of the reason the loans were approved in the first place. Haigh’s account suggested a lender that was willing to do business, but not willing to take the borrower’s figures entirely on trust. In a case built around whether Trump’s paperwork overstated value, that was enough to keep the focus where prosecutors wanted it: on the numbers themselves. ([apnews.com](https://apnews.com/article/364d1052f98816121000c26dc66f3878?utm_source=openai))