A judge has ordered former President Donald Trump to pay about $355 million (£281 million) to New York State for lying about the worth of his properties.
Judge Arthur Engoron also prohibited him from serving as a company director or taking out loans from state institutions for three years.
The New York real estate billionaire avoided having several of his firms liquidated, which may have led to bankruptcy.
Speaking from his Florida home, Mr. Trump stated that he would appeal the verdict.
“A crooked New York state judge just ruled I have to pay a fine of $355 million for having built a perfect company,” the former president said from Mar-a-Lago on Friday, calling the ruling a political witch hunt.
“It’s a very sad day for, in my opinion, the country.”
In his ruling on Friday, Judge Engoron cited earlier charges of wrongdoing to support the huge amounts he ordered the defendants to pay, saying that they “are likely to continue their fraudulent ways” unless he issued a “significant” punishment.
He specifically referred to the Trump Organisation’s conviction in a criminal tax fraud case in 2022, in which a jury determined that it had benefited its top executives with off-the-books benefits for more than a decade.
“Their complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological,” Judge Engoron wrote in an at times scathing 92-page decision.
Later, he said, “The frauds found here leap off the page and shock the conscience.”
Still, Mr. Trump’s company avoided one of the worst-case scenarios: the termination of its business licences, also known as the corporate death penalty.
Instead, the judge ordered two levels of oversight: an independent monitor who would report to the court for up to three years, and a separate independent director of compliance.
The judge is also forcing Mr. Trump to pay interest on the gains he made from the deception (known as “prejudgment interest”), which may increase the total penalty to roughly $450 million.
Together with what Mr. Trump has been ordered to pay, his two adult sons and co-defendants, Donald Jr. and Eric, must also pay $4 million. They have been forbidden from doing business in New York for two years, while another co-defendant, Allen Weisselberg, the former CFO of the Trump Organisation, has been sentenced to pay $1 million.
Furthermore, Mr. Trump, his company, and its affiliates will be unable to obtain loans in New York for the next three years.
Both of Mr. Trump’s sons condemned the sentence on social media, with Donald Jr. alleging it was politically motivated and Eric calling the judge “a cruel man.”.
In her civil case, New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, accused all four defendants and the larger Trump Organisation of significantly inflating property valuations and falsifying financial accounts in order to borrow enormous quantities of money at favourable interest rates. She had requested a penalty of $370 million.
On Friday, she said, “There cannot be different rules for different people in this country, and former presidents are no exception.”
“Donald Trump may have authored the art of the deal, but he perfected the art of the steal,” she told a news conference.
In September, Judge Engoron found that Mr. Trump was culpable for corporate fraud, finding that he had overstated his worth by hundreds of millions of dollars.
In one case, the judge determined that Mr. Trump’s financial statements falsely claimed that his Trump Tower penthouse was nearly three times its real size.
The subsequent 43-day trial, which began late last year and featured testimony from 40 witnesses, was primarily concerned with establishing penalties against Mr. Trump.
Judge Ergoron’s decision explains his reasons in detail, frequently delving into financial and accounting processes and directly addressing testimony from experts and witnesses.
“In order to borrow more and at lower rates, defendants submitted blatantly false financial data to the accountants, resulting in fraudulent financial statements,” he wrote. “When confronted at trial with the statements, defendants’ facts and expert witnesses simply denied reality, and defendants failed to accept responsibility.”
Legal experts told reporters that Judge Engoron may have produced a thorough record with the expectation that Mr. Trump would appeal.
Throughout the trial, Mr. Trump fiercely denied any wrongdoing. Mr. Trump declared himself an “innocent man” and dubbed the case a “fraud on me” in a six-minute remark during final arguments in January.
And the former president often stated that he paid his loans, implying that there was no crime.
While Judge Engoron acknowledged that no banks were harmed in his decision, he cautioned that “the next group of lenders to receive bogus statements might not be so lucky.”.
The latest penalty adds to the $83.3 million owed by Mr. Trump to writer E. Jean Carroll in a separate defamation case. However, despite the large sum, it is unlikely to bankrupt a man with a total net worth estimated at $2.6 billion.
