A New York appeals court Thursday threw out the massive $464 million judgment dealt to President Trump after he was found liable at a civil trial for business fraud.
The Appellate Division, First Department overturned the whopping fine in the case in which Trump, 78, was found to have fraudulently inflated his net worth by billions of dollars over a decade to get better loan and insurance terms.
Trump would have had to pay a total of more than $500 million, including more than $100 million in interest, had the February 2024 ruling from Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron been upheld.
The appeal court’s decision follows a theatric 11-week trial that threatened to derail Trump’s image as a real estate tycoon — and brand him a fraudster — as he campaigned to regain the White House.
Trial evidence revealed that Trump secured cushy interest rates between 2011 and 2021 after goosing up the value of assets like his Big Apple penthouse and Mar-a-Lago estate on financial papers.
Trump’s business falsely claimed that his Trump Tower triplex was 30,000 square feet — rather than its true size of 11,000 square feet — and used the phony figures to pump up the pad’s value to $327 million in 2015 after claiming it was worth $80 million just four years earlier, evidence showed.
Trump also valued Mar-a-Lago at $517 million on a financial filing despite his own tax broker admitting to listing the palatial estate’s “market value” at just $27 million in 2020, a witness revealed.
Trump tax representative Michael Corbiciero testified that he used the lowball valuation — which is far below the estate’s value if it were sold as a private home — by calling the estate a “social club,” a distinction that scored Trump juicy tax breaks.
The deed for Mar-A-Lago bars Trump from selling the estate as anything but a social club, trial evidence shows.
Trump nonetheless told banks and insurers that the Palm Beach estate was worth $517 million, and boasted during the trial that it was actually worth up to $1.5 billion — which would make it four times’ more valuable than the most expensive private home listed in the country.
“The frauds found here leap off the page and shock the conscience,” Judge Engoron wrote in his ruling.
The ruling comes after some members of the five-judge appeals panel appeared skeptical in September of the merits of the lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James, which led to the trial.
Judge Peter Moulton called the size of the penalty “troubling” and questioned if the law James had used to sue Trump — which doesn’t technically require someone to be “harmed” — had “morphed into something it was not meant to do.”
The case roiled the soon-to-be-47th president, who chose to leave the campaign trial for several days to attend the trial, calling the proceedings a “political witch hunt” and insisting that he did “nothing wrong.”
Engoron and James are both elected Democrats, and James campaigned on a promise to investigate Trump, calling the then-president a “con man” and ″carnival barker.”
Trump’s lawyers argued that the case had no “victims,” and that “sophisticated” companies like Deutsche Bank did their own research before entering into the deals, and were all paid back in full.
But James’ office argued that Trump’s fudged financial filings were nonetheless harmful to the marketplace as a whole — and Engoron agreed.
“The next group of lenders to receive bogus statements might not be so lucky,” he wrote in his ruling.
Trump has posted a bond of $175 million as he appeals the ruling, and will get the chance to further challenge it next in the Empire State’s highest appeals court, the New York State Court of Appeals.
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