New financial disclosures from the former US president Donald Trump for 2025 have landed with a thud in London. Sources confirm the 80-page document, filed with the US Office of Government Ethics, is now being scrutinised by HM Revenue and Customs. The reason? A tangled web of intellectual property, licensing deals and a branded perfume empire that seems designed to make auditors weep.
The forms, released late last night, show Trump’s income streams are as eccentric as his public persona. He earned $300,000 from sales of the God Bless the USA Bible, a leather-bound edition featuring the national anthem lyrics and a handwritten chorus by Trump himself. Then there’s the Home Alone 2: Lost in New York royalties. Yes, the 1992 cameo still pays. Licensing fees from a perfume line called Trump Empire, marketed as ‘the scent of success’, brought in $1.2 million. These are not the holdings of a retired real estate mogul. They are the portfolio of a man who has turned his name into a slot machine.
But British tax authorities are not amused. Trump’s business empire has a long history of opaque structures. The new filing reveals a UK-based company, Trump Organisation Ltd, registered in London, which received $4 million in licensing fees from a Saudi-backed real estate firm. The trail goes cold after that. A former HMRC investigator, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me: ‘This looks like a classic round-tripping scheme. Money comes in, gets labelled as a fee, and disappears into a trust. We’ve seen it a hundred times.’
The document also lists a ‘consulting fee’ of $2.5 million paid to a shell company in the Cayman Islands. The recipient: a firm called Vantage Advisors, which shares a registered address with a Trump family trust. Coincidence? In my ten years on this beat, I’ve learned that in the world of high finance, there are no coincidences. Only patterns.
Let’s talk about the Bibles. The God Bless the USA Bible is published by a company called Patriot Church, which is owned by a Trump associate who has been indicted for fraud in Florida. The royalties flow through a non-profit called the Trump Family Foundation, which is already under investigation by the New York Attorney General for self-dealing. HMRC is now asking whether those royalties were declared correctly. The answer, sources say, is almost certainly no. A former Treasury official explained: ‘If the foundation is the beneficiary, it should be tax-exempt. But if Trump personally endorses the product and profits from it, that’s a different story.’
Then there’s the perfume. Trump Empire perfumes are manufactured in China and sold online through a network of affiliates. The filing shows that Trump personally owns the trademark, but the licensing fees are paid to a company in Delaware with no physical presence. That company then takes a 70 per cent cut and sends the rest to a trust in Cyprus. British tax authorities have flagged this as a potential ‘profit-shifting’ arrangement, where income is moved to low-tax jurisdictions to avoid UK corporation tax.
I’ve seen this playbook before. It’s the same structure used by oligarchs and drug cartels. The key is to create a maze so complex that regulators give up. But HMRC is not giving up. They have requested additional documents from Trump Organisation Ltd and are considering a formal investigation into whether the former president has unpaid UK taxes dating back to 2020. If they find evidence of evasion, the penalties could be crippling.
Trump’s representatives have called the allegations ‘baseless’ and said the filing is ‘fully compliant’. But they declined to answer specific questions about the Cayman Islands payment or the Bible royalties. In a statement, they said: ‘President Trump is a successful businessman who has always paid what is legally required.’ The problem is, the law and what is ‘legally required’ are often two different things when you have the best lawyers money can buy.
This isn’t just a story about one man’s finances. It’s a story about a system that allows the wealthy to treat tax laws as shopping lists. The Bibles, the perfume, the movie royalties: they are all just cogs in a machine designed to move money beyond the reach of tax collectors. British authorities are now asking whether that machine has an off switch. I’ll be following the money. And the bodies.
