Politico quoted me in Selling His Empire Would Cost Trump Money. A Lot of It. It opens,
Donald Trump’s critics say the only way for him to keep his business interests separate from the public’s interest is to simply get out of business entirely, selling his companies and putting the proceeds into anonymous assets that someone else can manage.
But there’s nothing simple about it: unloading a real estate empire as large as Trump’s is a lengthy, complicated process fraught with ethical pitfalls, one that could end up costing a fortune.
“He has to make a choice,” said David Reiss, director of Brooklyn Law’s Center for Urban Business Entrepreneurship. “How much pain is he willing to take?”
Trump, who’s expected to lay out a plan to address conflicts of interest at a press conference Wednesday, heads a particularly difficult estate to unwind. Forbes has pegged his net worth at $3.7 billion in September, attributing most of that to real property holdings tangled in debt, partnership agreements, management contracts, branding deals and tax deferrals.
Ethics watchdogs say Trump’s cleanest break would be to sell his company to the public, but an initial public offering — especially one that folds in most or all of Trump’s scattered businesses — would be complicated, costly and time-consuming.
“The nature of the business doesn’t lend itself to going public,” said Jan Baran, co-chair of Wiley Rein’s election law and government ethics practice. “Rolling in all the real estate and the royalty contracts and all the other orphans like wineries and steaks, it’s a little hard to imagine any public companies that resemble what his business is, because it’s such a hodgepodge of things. It would take a while, it would take at least a year.”
What’s more, Baran noted, an IPO would require underwriters to raise capital and pull together an offering — raising new concerns about investment firms potentially currying favor with the new administration.
“Are the ethics complainers willing to let Goldman Sachs do the underwriting on this public offering?” he said. “Somebody’s got to put it together.”
Even if Trump chose to skip the IPO and just liquidate his assets via direct sales, he’d face a complex task — and a costly one.
“This would be an extraordinarily difficult situation,” said Neil Shapiro, a law partner at Herrick Feinstein in New York. “It would certainly be unprecedented in terms of somebody liquidating a portfolio of this size. We’re in uncharted territories here.”
The problems start with finding a buyer. The pool of people shopping for, say, a Fifth Avenue skyscraper is small, and only the buyer and seller can say for sure whether the price paid is fair. As such, selling a property raises nearly as many ethical quandaries for Trump as owning it. A buyer looking to curry favor with the next president might pay too much. Another might do Trump a favor by making a quick deal while paying too little.
