One of Donald Trump’s companies prepared financial estimates for its lenders and investors that were "rosier" than the projections it used internally, a financial analyst for the company said in a deposition obtained by BuzzFeed News.

The testimony concerns Trump’s $200 million project to transform the Old Post Office building — a taxpayer-owned landmark just five blocks from White House — into a luxury hotel. The company developing the hotel is owned by Trump and three of his children, Ivanka, Donald Jr., and Eric.

Lenders were told the hotel could earn millions of dollars more than the more conservative, internal estimates, the financial analyst, Raymond Flores, testified. He said those internal projections "generally tend to err on the side of being pretty conservative."

Later he said, “And then there are other projections where, you know, we're pitching to a lender or an equity source, where it's rosier." With these projections, he said, “we’re pushing the boundaries of — we're pushing ranges of reasonability at those — at those projections to show, you know, what the hotel could be."

He defended the more aggressive projections, saying the company would not have put them forth “unless we could reasonably stand by them,” but his testimony gives a forensic look into how the company developing Trump's D.C. hotel operated.

Representatives from the Trump campaign and the Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment Friday evening. But earlier this week, before the full depositions were released, a spokesperson for the Trump Organization emailed BuzzFeed News the following statement: “Because no one can predict the future, it is standard practice in virtually every industry for businesses to run multiple financial models analyzing projected performance based on varying outcomes. Once again, this is yet another example of the media attempting to make something out of nothing.”

Financial experts say many companies prepare multiple sets of projections, and there’s nothing inherently illegal about that. The potential trouble arises when projections are used to misrepresent what management knows to be true.



From a legal perspective, a projection about the future is more opinion than fact, said Robert Bartlett, a professor at the University of California Berkeley School of Law who specializes in securities regulation and capital markets. Still, he added, the existence of two sets of books could help illuminate the matter.

"It smells a little fishy," he said. "If the internal set of books was what they held out to themselves as the true and likely scenario, then that would seem to be circumstantial evidence that the rosy projections were not honestly held projections."