Donald Trump ordered to pay $355M, barred from NY business

A New York judge ordered that former President Donald Trump pay $355 million — and temporarily banned him from doing business in the state where he made his name — after finding Friday that he inflated his net worth by billions to dupe banks and insurers over the course of a decade.

Trump, 77, will be barred from serving as an officer or director of any company in New York for three years, under the ruling from Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron.

If it withstands an inevitable appeal, the decision could cause Trump to be stripped of control over Midtown’s Trump Tower and his other iconic New York properties.

Engoron also issued a two-year New York business ban against Trump’s two eldest sons and ordered them to pay $4 million each.

The decision capped a three-month civil trial that put a dent in 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 front-runner just weeks after he was slapped with an $83.3 million jury verdict in a defamation damages case in Manhattan federal court.

Trump propped up his business between 2011 and 2021 by goosing up 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,” Engoron wrote in a scathing pre-trial ruling.

Trump’s Big Apple penthouse and palatial Palm Beach estate were among more than a dozen properties he regularly overvalued to secure cushy interest rates that saved the Trump Organization hundreds of millions of dollars, according to accountants and real estate appraisers whom New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office called to the stand.

Trump’s business falsely claimed in the filings that the ex-president’s triplex at Trump Tower was 30,000 square feet — rather than its true size of 11,000 square feet, trial evidence revealed.

The company used the phony figures to pump up the pad’s value to $327 million in 2015 — more than four times the $80 million the company claimed the apartment was worth just four years earlier.

Trump’s tax broker also admitted in 2020 that Mar-a-Lago had a “market value” of just $27 million — even if someone would likely pay far more than that to buy it as a private home — because Trump instead called it a “social club” to score tax breaks.

Trump’s business nonetheless valued the property at $517 million 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 Cohen and ex-Trump Org financial honcho Allen Weisselberg should “reverse-engineer” the values of Trump’s holdings to meet his desired net worth goals.

“He would say, ‘I’m actually not worth $4.5 billion, I’m really worth more like 6 [billion],” Cohen testified during the Manhattan Supreme Court trial.

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,” James said when she announced her September 2022 suit against Trump, his adult children, his business and executives Weisselberg and Jeffrey McConney.

The AG’s Office had urged Engoron to order the defendants to pay back $370 million 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.

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 defense witness claimed.

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 he 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,” James had weaponized a state fraud law — which doesn’t technically require someone to be “harmed” — to pursue “victimless” crimes, they claimed.

Yet the GOP presidential candidate’s legal arguments were at times overshadowed by his attacks on Engoron and James in rants from the witness stand, the courthouse hallway, and on social media.

In October, Trump was forced to pay a $15,000 fine after repeatedly flouting a court order by disparaging Engoron’s chief law clerk, Allison Greenfield, who sat next to the jurist on the bench during the trial.

The penalty was levied after Trump, in a surprise hearing where he was abruptly called to the stand, claimed he hadn’t slammed Greenfield as “biased” to news cameras outside the courtroom.

Engoron deemed Trump “not credible” and scolded him for breaching a narrowly tailored gag order that barred him from ripping court staff.

After Trump harangued them on social media, Engoron and 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, Trump veered away from the facts of the case to insult the judge and argue that Engoron and 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 Engoron — who, like Trump, is a Queens native — the mogul yelled from the stand, “He called me a fraud and he didn’t know anything about me!”

Trump also delivered an unsanctioned tirade from the defense 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,” Trump proclaimed. “They should pay me for what we’ve had to go through.” 

Trump was not forced to attend the trial because it was 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, 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.

Describing James’ business fraud case as a “witch hunt,” Trump gestured furiously with his hands to the press scrum that court officers had pinned behind metal barricades to allow him room to speak.

“I think it’s a very sad day for America,” Trump added, before ducking away with his lawyers into a side room away from the news cameras.