(Bloomberg) -- As Donald Trump sits in a Manhattan courtroom Monday for a hearing in one of his criminal cases, he also faces a potential moment of truth for his finances: a deadline to either post a bond covering a $454 million civil fraud verdict or risk having New York state start seizing his assets.

The billionaire real estate mogul has been warning for weeks he didn’t have enough cash to cover a bond while he appeals the verdict in a suit by New York Attorney General Letitia James. He’d need 120% of the judgment, or about $545 million. Trump has asked the appeals court to waive the bond to spare him from being forced to hold a “fire sale” of his assets. So far the court hasn’t ruled.

Meanwhile, the former president and his lawyers arrived in court in New York Monday morning for a hearing in the so-called hush money case against him. A judge could set a trial date and rule on his latest motion to dismiss the case.

Meanwhile, Trump said last week he has “almost $500 million” in cash, and that he’ll use a “substantial” amount of that to fund his campaign to return to the White House. In a court filing he claimed he’d need closer to $1 billion in reserves to cover the bond and still have enough cash on hand to run his sprawling real estate company. Trump said the cash crunch emerged after 30 insurance companies that arrange such bonds refused to take any of his properties as collateral.

The weight of Trump’s many court fights has put a strain on his finances, with rising legal bills on top of his costly presidential campaign. He lost a defamation trial in Manhattan earlier this year — posting a $91.6 million bond to appeal that verdict — and faces four criminal prosecutions.

James, who won the fraud trial after suing Trump, has threatened to seize assets if he doesn’t pay up. She could start the process as soon as Monday, though it’s also possible she could wait to see how the appeals court rules before taking actions that could be difficult to reverse. James has already registered her whopping judgment in Westchester County near Manhattan, a sign that Trump’s properties there could be at risk.

Read More: What Happens If Trump Can’t Cover $454 Million Bond

Trump’s son Eric Trump, who is a defendant in the fraud case, criticized the bond requirement and called it “election interference” during an interview with Fox News host Maria Bartiromo on her “Sunday Morning Futures” program.

“They are making him do something that is not physically possible — putting up a half-a-billion dollar bond,” Eric Trump said. “Bonds like that don’t exist in this country. A $10 million bond is a large bond, a $15 million bond is an enormous bond — a half-a-billion dollar bond?”

Hush-Money Trial  

The hearing Monday in the hush-money case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is high-stakes. A judge will hear arguments on Trump’s last-ditch bid to dismiss charges by Bragg, who accused Trump of falsifying business records to disguise hush money payments to a porn star before the 2016 election.

The trial was originally set to start Monday, but Justice Juan Merchan delayed it after Trump’s lawyers complained tens of thousands of pages of potentially relevant evidence was turned over at the last minute. The records relate to information gathered years earlier during a separate federal probe of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who helped arrange the payments and is expected to be a key government witness at trial.

Bragg’s case will be the first of the criminal cases to go to trial and so far the only one scheduled to go before a jury before the November election. It’s not clear yet when trials will start in the separate election-interference cases in Washington and Georgia, or the classified records case in Florida. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has denied wrongdoing in all the cases and assailed Bragg’s prosecution as a “witch hunt.”

Bragg indicted Trump almost a year ago, alleging the billionaire filed false business records as part of scheme to suppress allegations by the porn star and others that threatened to hurt his 2016 campaign for president.

Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to federal campaign finance and tax charges tied to the hush-money payments. At the time, prosecutors said Cohen paid porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to buy her silence about a sexual encounter with Trump a decade earlier. The US said the payment was made with Trump’s knowledge but didn’t charge him because the Justice Department maintained a sitting president could not be indicted.

Bragg’s state indictment unsealed last April alleged Trump falsified his company’s business records by claiming he reimbursed Cohen for legal work to conceal the true nature of the hush-money payments.

--With assistance from Anya Andrianova.

(Updates with Trump arriving in court for hearing in hush-money case.)

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