A financial company simply “cut and paste” billing details while overcharging Rudy Giuliani by $151,000, the former mayor’s attorneys have claimed.
In a filing to New York bankruptcy court on Wednesday, Giuliani’s lawyers claimed that the company, Global Data Risk, “routinely engaged in […] duplicative billing”
Global Data Risk was hired by a committee of Giuliani’s creditors when he declared bankruptcy in December 2023.
Former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani attends the annual 9/11 Commemoration Ceremony on September 11, 2024 in New York City. His lawyers filed a motion in bankruptcy court on the same day, asking a judge to reduce fees that a firm is charging Giuliani for monitoring his finances. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
The company was tasked with monitoring Giuliani’s finances to assess if he was hiding income, assets or spending from the creditors.
The former New York mayor came out of bankruptcy in July and Global Data Risk presented him with a final bill of $324,843.75 in August.
Giuliani was attending a 9/11 commemoration in New York on Wednesday, along with President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Donald Trump and many others.
In Wednesday’s bankruptcy court filing, Giuliani’s lawyers included dozens of pages of billing entries in which they claim there are multiple entries by various Global Data Risk employees. These include “weekly meeting with Akin,” the law firm representing the creditors and multiple entries for media research and discussion of the media research.
“Not only do several entries bear the same time, data, and task description with minuted changes, some even appear to be copied and pasted entirely,” Giuliani’s lawyers wrote.
Newsweek sought email comment on Thursday from Global Data Risk, the creditor committee and Giuliani’s spokesman.
The filing complains that “a review of the Billing and Expense Details demonstrates that the employees and staff of GDR routinely engaged in such duplicative billing in that multiple individual timekeepers charged for attendance at the same event, meeting, or discussion and/or completion of the same service, thereby creating duplicative time entries for any given single service.”
It adds that the final total “often repetitive, seems to be inflated, if not excessive.”
“It is respectfully requested that the Court reduce the fees requested by GDR by $151,662.50, representative of the total sum of $77, 275.00 overbilled due to duplicative time entries and $74,387.50 of excessive research related services, together with such other, further, and different relief as this Court deems just, proper, and equitable,” the filing adds.
Giuliani declared bankruptcy in December last year after a jury awarded $148 million to two Georgia election workers who had won a defamation lawsuit against him. As an attorney for Donald Trump in 2020, Giuliani falsely accused mother and daughter Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss of adding ballots for Joe Biden, who won the state.
Freeman and Moss have hired attorney Rachel Strickland to recover assets from Giuliani, while the rest of the creditors have hired a separate law firm, Akin Gump.
Strickland previously alleged to bankruptcy judge, Sean Lane, that Giuliani was draining his bank account to avoid paying debtors.
In July, she told Lane that Giuliani spent thousands of dollars buying first-class plane tickets for himself, his girlfriend and his assistant to travel to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
The monthly expenses that Giuliani had to file to the court showed that he ate at the Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee, among other expenses.
