Donald Trump has been ordered by the US Supreme Court to hand over his tax returns and other financial records to prosecutors in New York.
In spite of a precedent that presidential candidates should do so, the former US president has refused to release documentation for so many years.
A lower court had previously decided that the papers were appropriate for a judicial inquiry.
The ruling does not necessarily mean the files will be made public.
The financial statements could be given as evidence for confidential scrutiny by a Grand Jury, which should only be released later on as part of a prosecution.
A grand jury is established by a judge to see whether there is appropriate proof to prosecute. The jury is empowered to investigate and to give summonses for people to bear witness.
The US Supreme Court’s decision is a blow to Mr Trump, who has been in a legal battle to protect his records from a grand jury for months.
Last July, the Supreme Court ruled that Mr Trump’s financial records could be examined by prosecutors in New York.
Yet Mr Trump’s lawyers contested this decision, arguing that the filing was “wildly inappropriate,” and issued in misrepresentation.
On Monday, the court rejected the lawyers’ argument.
According to US media, this was the last opportunity for the former president, who left the White House last month ahead of President Joe Biden’s inauguration, to keep the records private.
Mr Trump has continuously denied wrongdoing and has called the investigation into his tax affairs a “witch hunt”.
In a statement on Monday, Mr Trump accused New York prosecutors of unfairly targeting him and said that the Supreme Court “never should have let this ‘fishing expedition’ happen”.
What’s the background to this?
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, a Democrat, has been trying for months to obtain eight years’ worth of Mr Trump’s personal and corporate tax returns.
Mr Vance investigated allegations about the payment of hush money to two women who said they had sex with Mr Trump before the 2016 presidential election.
The district attorney has said that the tax returns and financial records are pertinent to the case.
It is alleged that the payments were made by Mr Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen to adult film star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal.
Mr Trump denies the affairs took place and described the Supreme Court’s ruling last July as “purely political”.
Lawyers for Mr Vance later said the inquiry would extend beyond purported hush money payments.
They citied newspaper articles about supposed bank and insurance fraud at the Trump Organization and congressional testimony by Cohen, who said the former president would devalue his assets when trying to reduce his taxes.
Mr Trump, who inherited money from his father and went on to become a property developer, is the first president since Richard Nixon in the 1970s not to have made his tax returns public.
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