Jared Kushner Image by Getty Images

By Aiden Pink August 27, 2018

The real estate company of Jared Kushner was given a $210,000 fine by New York City regulators for filing dozens of false housing permits, the Associated Press reported Monday.

The AP had reported earlier this year that the Kushner Companies had filed at least 80 permits in which they falsely claimed that there were no rent-controlled units in their buildings, despite other tax forms admitting otherwise. Those permits were filed while Kushner, now a senior advisor to his father-in-law President Trump, ran the company.

The claims that they had no rent-controlled tenants allowed the firm to commence with heavy construction to update their buildings. Rent-controlled tenants told the AP that they thought the construction was part of a campaign of harassment to get them to give up their units, which the real estate company would then be allowed to rent out again at higher market prices.

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The not-for-profit that helped the AP uncover the incorrect documents, the Housing Rights Initiative, also claimed Monday that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen engaged in a similar practice, though perhaps in a more brazen way: claiming in filings that buildings he owned were entirely empty, while in fact they were full of tenants, many of them rent-controlled.

Cohen pleaded guilty Tuesday to campaign finance violations, tax fraud, and bank fraud in connection with his work to silence women who said they had affairs with Trump.

A lawyer for Cohen and a representative for the Kushner Companies did not respond to the AP’s requests for comment.

Contact Aiden Pink at pink@forward.com or on Twitter, @aidenpink

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