Donald Trump ordered to pay more than $536 million, barred from NY business
The man who could be the next US president has being dealt a stunning blow with Donald Trump ordered to pay $536 million in a fraud case.
A US judge has ordered that former president Donald Trump pay more than $US350 million ($A536m) after finding that he inflated his net worth by billions to dupe banks and insurers over the course of a decade.
A court in New York City has also limited what business the expected Republican presidential nominee can do in the state where he made his name and where several skyscrapers named after him are located.
The ruling from Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, if it withstands an inevitable appeal, could cause Mr Trump, 77, to be stripped of control over Fifth Avenue’s Trump Tower and his other iconic New York properties, reported the New York Post.
Justice Engoron’s decision capped a three-month civil trial that put a dent in Mr Trump’s carefully groomed image as a mogul who grew his father’s company into one of the world’s most famous real estate brands before entering politics.
It also delivered a fresh financial blow to the 2024 Republican presidential frontrunner just weeks after he was slapped with an $US83.3 million ($A127.5m) jury verdict in a defamation damages case in Manhattan federal court.
Overvalued assets
Mr Trump propped up his business between 2011 and 2021 by inflating the value of assets like his namesake Midtown tower and Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida on financial filings as if he lived in a “fantasy world,” Justicie Engoron wrote in a scathing pre-trial ruling.
Mr Trump’s Big Apple penthouse and palatial Palm Beach estate were among more than a dozen properties he regularly overvalued to secure better interest rates that saved the Trump Organisation hundreds of millions of dollars, according to accountants and real estate appraisers that New York Attorney-General Letitia James’ office called to the stand.
Mr Trump’s business falsely claimed in the files that the ex-president’s triplex at Trump Tower was 9144 square metres — rather than its true size of 3350 square metres, trial evidence revealed.
The company then used the phony figures to pump up the pad’s value to $US327m ($A500m) in 2015 — more than four times the $US80m ($A122m) the company claimed the apartment was worth just four years earlier.
Mr Trump’s tax broker also admitted in 2020 that Mar-a-Lago had a “market value” of just $US27m ($A41.3m) — even if someone would likely pay far more than that to buy it as a private home — because Mr Trump instead called it a “social club” to score tax breaks.
Mr Trump’s business nonetheless valued the property at $US517m ($A791m) on a financial filing, evidence revealed.
His former “fixer” Michael Cohen also testified that the 45th president strongly implied — speaking “like a mob boss” — that Mr Cohen and ex-Trump Organisation financial head Allen Weisselberg should “reverse-engineer” the values of Mr Trump’s holdings to meet his desired net worth goals.
“He would say, ‘I’m actually not worth $US4.5 billion ($A6.9 billion), I’m really worth more like 6 [billion] ($A9.2bn),” Mr Cohen testified during the Manhattan Supreme Court trial.
Mr Trump, whose 1987 book The Art of the Deal helped build his reputation as a savvy negotiator, “thought he could get away with the art of the steal,” Ms James said when she announced her September 2022 suit against Mr Trump, his adult children, his business and executives Mr Weisselberg and Jeffrey McConney.
The AG’s office had urged Justice Engoron to order the defendants to pay back $US370 m ($A566m) reaped through “ill-gotten” interest rate perks and property deals, plus interest.
Testimony at the trial lasted for 11 weeks and featured the former commander-in-chief, and kids Eric, 39, Ivanka, 42, and Donald Jr., 45, all taking the witness stand.
Size of Trump’s apartment ‘subjective’
Mr Trump’s lawyers argued that he should be cleared because all aspects of real estate valuation — including the square footage of an apartment — are inherently “subjective”.
The tripling of the size of his penthouse was merely a harmless “error in calculation,” one defence witness claimed.
Mr Trump and his adult children also tried to pass off the blame for any inaccuracies contained in company financial filings to the accountants and lawyers who compiled them.
The ex-president took the stand in November and argued that the banks didn’t actually rely on the financial statements before deciding to lend him money. But he acknowledged that helped assemble the documents.
“If somebody would ask me for an opinion, I would give it to them,” he testified, adding “I think I’ve shown I know more about real estate than other people”.
His lawyers said the banks benefited from the loans and were all paid back in full. Even if the statements did include “errors,” Ms James had weaponised a state fraud law — which doesn’t technically require someone to be “harmed” — to pursue “victimless” crimes, they claimed.
Yet the Republican presidential candidate’s legal arguments were at times overshadowed by his attacks on Justice Engoron and Ms James in rants from the witness stand, the courthouse hallway, and on social media.
In October, Mr Trump was forced to pay a $US15,000 ($A23,957) fine after repeatedly flouting a court order by disparaging Justice Engoron’s chief law clerk, Allison Greenfield, who sat next to the jurist on the bench during the trial.
The penalty was levied after Mr Trump, in a surprise hearing where he was abruptly called to the stand, claimed he hadn’t slammed Ms Greenfield as “biased” to news cameras outside the courtroom.
Justice Engoron deemed Mr Trump “not credible” and scolded him for breaching a narrowly-tailored gag order that barred him from ripping court staff.
Trump’s tirades at court staff
After Mr Trump harangued them on social media, Justice Engoron and Ms Greenfield were both flooded with daily, vicious phone calls and online attacks containing “harassing, disparaging comments and antisemitic tropes,” according to a sworn affidavit from a state court officer captain.
During his testimony, Mr Trump veered away from the facts of the case to insult the judge and argue that Justice Engoron and Ms James, both Democrats, were conspiring against him.
“People don’t know how good a company I built! You know why? Because people like you try and demean me and hurt me, probably for political reasons,” he fumed.
Pointing at Justice Engoron — who like Mr Trump is a native of the New Yok City borough of Queens — the mogul yelled from the stand, “He called me a fraud and he didn’t know anything about me!”
Mr Trump also delivered an unsanctioned tirade from the defence table as the trial wrapped up, speaking for five minutes and ignoring the judge’s demand that he stick to describing trial evidence.
“I did nothing wrong,” Mr Trump proclaimed. “They should pay me for what we’ve had to go through.”
Mr Trump was not forced to attend the trial because it’s a civil case rather than a criminal one. He treated the courthouse as a de facto campaign outpost when he did appear.
Throughout the proceedings, Mr Trump was allowed to hold impromptu press conferences in the state courthouse’s third-floor hallway — an opportunity not typically afforded to defendants facing trial.
He repeated the same mantra he’s also embraced to push back on a civil jury’s finding that he sexually abused writer E Jean Carroll in 1996 and to answer criminal charges of conspiring to overturn an election, hiding classified documents and concealing payments to a porn star to hide a sex scandal.
According to Trump, his civil suits — and the 91 criminal charges he’s facing across four states — are all part of a politically motivated scheme to bring him down.
“Everything we did was absolutely right,” he maintained in the Manhattan court’s hallway after leaving the stand in November.
This story appeared in the New York Post and is reproduced with permission.
Read related topics:Donald Trump
Sickening act sparks violent street brawl
The confronting moment a man and woman brawl on the street has been caught on camera - and one sickening act sparked the ugly melee.
Read more
‘Active shooter’ on run after highway attacks
Police are hunting for the culprit who allegedly shot at several people on a busy highway in the US.
Read more
‘Find him’: Mum’s chilling call before attack
Accused school shooter, Colt Gray, reportedly sent a chilling text to his mother before allegedly opening fire on staff and students, killing four people.
Read more