According to The New York Times, President Donald Trump failed to pay taxes on almost $300 million in loans he received. Loans are considered to be taxable income, and not paying the required taxes on them is illegal in almost every instance.

The Times notes:

“The president’s federal income tax records, obtained by The New York Times, show for the first time that, since 2010, his lenders have forgiven about $287 million in debt that he failed to repay. The vast majority was related to the Chicago project.”

Loans are indeed considered to be taxable income, Forbes reports, adding that such loans “would normally count as taxable income.” And yet Trump appears to have not paid a dime on the $287 million he borrowed to finance a building project in Chicago.

The “Chicago project” referenced by The Times refers to the Trump International Hotel & Tower, which was financed through various sources:

“Deutsche Bank agreed to loan Trump’s LLC $640 million for the Chicago project, including $40 million personally guaranteed by Trump. He also borrowed $130 million from Fortress Investment Group as part of a deal with a double-digit interest rate and an additional fee of $49 million when repaying the loan.”

In the end, the lenders agreed to forgive most of the debt incurred by Trump and the Trump Organization, but the money they had loaned to Trump still should have been reported as income and was subject to taxes at both the federal and state level, which would explain why New York authorities are currently investigating the president and his corporation for possibly having committed tax and insurance fraud, The Times explains:

“Those forgiven debts are now part of a broader investigation of Mr. Trump’s business by the New York attorney general. They normally would have generated a big tax bill, since the Internal Revenue Service treats canceled debts as income. Yet as has often happened in his long career, Mr. Trump appears to have paid almost no federal income tax on that money, in part because of large losses in his other businesses, The Times’s analysis of his tax records found.”

This latest information comes just a month after The Times revealed that the president paid only $750 in taxes in 2016 and 2017. The Times has also found that Trump holds a secret bank account in China and may have committed tax fraud by claiming illegal charitable donations.

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