Rudy Giuliani’s bankruptcy accountant took $12,000 from him and quit, and now he can’t find anyone else willing to sign his financial statements—potentially forcing him to become his own accountant and assume personal responsibility for his records.
That’s one piece of eye-popping news found in a series of court records filed on Tuesday related to Donald Trump’s bankrupt, criminally indicted, slanderous former personal attorney’s ongoing financial woes. In all, the filings paint a picture of a recalcitrant debtor abusing the judicial system in an attempt to stave off his financial obligations with one hand, while blissfully draining his bank accounts with the other.
Giuliani’s creditors likened the experience to being “on a hamster wheel,” in a separate filing on Tuesday detailing their efforts to hold Giuliani accountable “for his recurring and continuous misdeeds.”
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Among other things, their complaints included multiple blown deadlines for filing monthly personal financial statements, which Giuliani only submitted over the last few days. But the reason he had fallen behind, his lawyer said, was because his accountant had bailed on him.
“Unfortunately, the Debtor originally had an accountant who was helping, however, he had a change of heart and indicated that he no longer wished to help prepare the monthly operating reports,” the filing said, though it did not specify exactly when the “change of heart” occurred.
The document further explained that Giuliani had then solicited help from “a number of accounting firms and CPAs,” but “no one seems interested in taking the assignment,” suggesting that no licensed financial officers can be paid to put their names on Giuliani’s court statements. Instead, the lawyer indicated that Giuliani would now complete those reports himself.
Some context from other motions that rolled in from angry creditors on the same day could explain why an accountant might think twice before taking on this particular client.
As one of those motions noted, Giuliani had actually paid the now-former bookkeeper—Long Island-based CPA Joe Ricci—a whopping $12,000 two months ago. On top of the expense being a “brazenly unauthorized payment,” the motion said, Giuliani never told the court that he had even retained an accountant in the first place, and it’s unclear when or why Ricci ended the relationship. (Ricci didn’t reply to The Daily Beast’s comment request.)
That $12,000 payment appeared in one of the two monthly operating statements—covering February and March—that Giuliani finally filed over the last few days, missing both deadlines by weeks. The statements further showed that Giuliani’s personal spending continued to outpace his social security and broadcast earnings, losing about $16,000 in February and bleeding out another $10,000 in March.
One expense from March can be tied to a Palm Beach grocery store visit that Giuliani had shared on social media. The March 24 post featured a photo of Giuliani behind a Publix shopping cart loaded with plastic bags, captioned “Biden’s economy was killing us.”
Giuliani’s bank statements show two charges at Publix that day, in the amounts of $114.85 and $13.78. Weeks earlier, however, Giuliani had spent more than that—$161.18—at Mariella Pizza in Manhattan. He also spent more money in March on alternative streaming platform Rumble and orders from the right-wing Epoch Times than he did at Publix.
After the Publix trip, Giuliani made a same-day ATM withdrawal of $1,000 in cash, the statements show.
In all, Giuliani’s total March income was a little more than $18,000, while his living expenses topped $28,000. Meanwhile, the federal political action committee raising money for Giuliani’s legal woes, called “Giuliani Defense,” was sitting on more than $200,000 at the end of March. The PAC reported no payments to any lawyers over the first three months of the year, but received a $100,000 gift from the Florida Crystals Corporation, a sugar company whose owner might be a witness in a sexual assault and defamation lawsuit brought by former Giuliani aide Noelle Dunphy.
Still, Giuliani and his allies have played up his financial troubles in their efforts to score support for his legal defense. Giuliani—who declared bankruptcy in December after a Georgia court ordered him to pay $148 million to two election workers he had repeatedly slandered—has allegedly been using the constitutionally afforded appeals process in that case to slow-walk his Chapter 11 proceedings.
In January, the bankruptcy court awarded Giuliani a limited reprieve so that he could appeal the judgment, but his creditors—who include the women he defamed, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss—are now arguing that Giuliani is abusing the privilege “while he continually delays his day of reckoning, at their expense.”
On Tuesday, Giuliani’s creditors told the court that the former Lifelock spokesperson “pretends” that his appeal is ultimately for their benefit, but has had “virtually no communication,” including about the timeline of when he plans to file his “long-awaited application” at Sotheby’s International Realty to offload his Manhattan condo.
“Instead, the Debtor continues wasting resources funding and living in two multi-million dollar residences, proposes extended deadlines for himself in the chapter 11 case, misses those same extended deadlines, consistently fails to file timely monthly operating reports and leaves his creditors and this Court largely in the dark,” the motion states.
Now, that filing burden would appear to fall to Giuliani personally.
In the Tuesday filing, Giuliani’s lawyer told the court that his client’s finances are “fairly straight forward,” claiming that his income comes mainly from social security payouts along with “whatever little bit of money comes in from his radio show and podcast.”
The attorney said that, in the absence of a willing accountant, he had since gone over the reporting process with Giuliani personally, who “indicated that going forward, the operating reports will be filed on a timely basis.”
