Donald Trump is being sued for US$1.3 million by three real-estate brokers who say he has failed to pay them in full after the profitable sale of land and apartments he owned on the former West Side Manhattan rail yards.
The lawsuit centers on the billionaire developer's sale of 30.8 hectares of riverfront property and three buildings to the Extell Development Corp and Carlyle Group for US$1.8 billion. Parties to the October deal said it was the biggest residential sale in the city's history.
Barbara Corcoran, founder and principal of one of New York's major real-estate firms, and two of her brokers say in the lawsuit that they have a contract that set the terms of their compensation from the sale.
The contract, their court papers say, called for Trump to pay them US$4 million in commissions -- a US$2 million base commission for arranging the financing to develop the properties and a US$2 million percentage commission after the properties' sale.
The brokers' lawyer, Richard Seltzer, said that Trump had paid his clients -- Corcoran, Carrie Chiang and Susan Cara-Madden -- US$2.7 million, leaving US$1.3 million due.
Trump replied on Wednesday that he does not owe the brokers any money -- yet.
"The agreement is very clear," Trump said.
"I only pay them when I get paid. We haven't gotten the money yet. For her to bring a lawsuit against me is insane," he said.
Trump complained that Corcoran was ungrateful since he had given her "tens of millions of dollars in business over the years" and had done favors for her. He said he was through doing business with her.
Trump lawyer Jason Greenblatt said there is no date when the payment to the brokers comes due.
"When we get paid our distribution, they will get paid their share. They're asking for something they're not owed at this time," he said.
Seltzer, the brokers' lawyer, said Trump can say he doesn't have the money because he immediately reinvested it in real estate so he could avoid paying capital gains taxes. He said the sale of the property "triggered his obligation to pay the balance of the US$4 million."
The 30.8 hectare parcel stretches from 59th Street to 72nd Street on Manhattan's Upper West Side, along the Hudson River.
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
PROJECTION: TSMC said it expects strong growth this year, with revenue in US dollars projected to grow by about 30 percent, outperforming the industry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported consolidated sales last month reached NT$317.66 billion (US$9.98 billion), the highest ever for the month of February, driven by robust demand for chips built using the company’s advanced 3-nanometer (3nm) process. Last month’s figure was up 22.2 percent from a year earlier, but fell 20.8 percent from January, the world’s largest contract chipmaker said in a statement. For the first two months of the year, TSMC posted cumulative sales of NT$718.91 billion, up 29.9 percent from a year earlier. Analysts attributed the growth to sustained global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) products
RSS