Jan. 17--The Donald's hotel and casino company got rapped by the federal government yesterday for giving investors a misleading report about its profits. 

In a "cease and desist" order against Trump Hotels & Casinos, the SEC charged the company overstated profits in the third quarter of 1999 by 350 percent. 

Though the agency called the behavior "fraudulent," it imposed no fine, a common practice in such cases, an SEC lawyer said. 

Trump himself wasn't implicated in yesterday's action, the SEC said. At the time of the infraction, Nicholas Ribis, a long-time confidant of Trump, was chief executive of the company. Ribis left in 2000. 

Saying he was "happy with the end result," Trump told the Daily News the incident was "a long time ago. I wasn't involved. How it happened I can't tell you." 

The case marks the SEC's first salvo against a method of reporting company profits that allows companies to leave out one-time events that might affect their results. 

"If you going to use [such accounting], you can't hide the ball," SEC lawyer Wayne Carlin said in announcing the action. 

The case grew out of a press release Trump Hotels put out in October 1999, reporting profits of 63 cents a share. Wall Street analysts had predicted the company would earn 54 cents. 

The Trump release "blew out everybody's estimates," said Goldman Sachs analyst John Kempf. "Analysts were kind of skeptical. People knew there was something out of whack, but we didn't know what it was." 

According to the SEC, the company release concealed the true source of that quarter's stellar performance: Planet Hollywood International had filed for bankruptcy, giving Trump control of the Official All-Star Cafe at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. The company reported this as a $17 million profit from normal operations, instead of being a one-time event. 

The move made a big difference in Trump Hotels' results. While the 63 cents-per-share result beat the previous year's 24 cents a share, profits without the $17 million would have been worse than the previous year -- about 14 cents a share, according to Carlin. 

"Without disclosing the one-time gain, that was misleading," Carlin said. 

Trump Hotels shares fell 22 cents yesterday to $1.73. 

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