There has already been speculation as to whether Donald Trump would have to file for bankruptcy because of his conviction in the fraud trial. But then along came the very rich Don Hankey. A good deal, says the entrepreneur.
Don Hankey hasn’t been in the spotlight much. As a young man, he took over his father’s car dealership business. He developed this further and later granted large-scale loans to people who actually couldn’t afford a car but really wanted one. The interest rates are said to have been horrendously high in some cases, so high that the official consumer protection office also found that Hankey had gone too far.
The car loan business has given rise to a widespread corporate structure, at the center of which is the Hankey Group with reported assets of $23.4 billion. It owns several credit companies, does real estate business, has insurance in its portfolio and is a large shareholder in the small Axos Bank. The construct also made its owner, Don Hankey, extremely rich. In 2015, Forbes estimated his fortune at $7.4 billion.
Despite his wealth, the 80-year-old has not yet attracted attention as a political patron. He repeatedly transferred donations to politicians, to Republicans, but also to Democrats, he tells the Washington Post. He also admits that he previously supported Trump. However, he does not come out as a Trump fan.
A political statement?
Nevertheless, he is now helping the former president and renewed Republican presidential candidate out of trouble and granting Donald Trump a loan. Trump deposited this in a New York court that had asked him to post bail of $175 million so that he and his business partners could challenge the fraud conviction. A political statement? Hankey says no: Above all, it is good business.
It is not known exactly how high the bond is. Nor what collateral Trump had to provide. Don Hankey simply says that money was deposited in cash, that his company also checked other guarantees and that they proved to be first-class. The court accepted the bond on Monday.
After the judge’s ruling, Hankey himself sought contact with Donald Trump to make him an offer. He was angry that the New York court had convicted Trump for a practice that was common in the real estate industry. Applicants, Hankey told the Washington Post, would also inflate their assets in documents to his companies in three-quarters of the cases. And even though that is happening, the business is still functioning.
A Hankey company has already stepped in once
Last September, the judge in the civil case stated that Donald Trump, his two sons and other management members were guilty of commercial fraud by fudged the value of the Trump properties. This is how they got cheaper loans and insurance benefits. In February, after a three-month trial, the judge also ruled on the amount of ill-gotten gains that Trump must pay to the state of New York: with accrued interest, a dizzying sum of $464 million. An appeals court then reduced the bail amount to $175 million.
What’s interesting is that it’s not the first time that one of Hankey’s companies has stood by Trump in an emergency. According to media reports, Axos Bank is said to have kept the Trump Organization running with a loan of $225 million in 2022 after long-standing lenders terminated their cooperation because of Trump’s role in the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. It is said that Don Hankey was not previously informed about the deal. The bank’s president agreed to the deal, not for political reasons, but because the bank could make money with it.