A New York judge ordered Donald Trump and his companies on Friday to pay more than $355 million in penalties, finding they engaged in a years-long scheme to dupe banks and others with financial statements that inflated his wealth.
Trump won’t have to pay out the money now as an appeals process will have to play out, but the verdict still is a stunning setback for the former president.
.jpg)
If he is ultimately forced to pay, the size of the penalty on top of earlier judgments would dramatically diminish his financial resources. And the ruling undermines the image of a successful businessman that the Republican has carefully tailored to power his unlikely rise from a reality television star to a onetime — and perhaps future — president.
Judge Arthur Engoron concluded that Trump and his company were “likely to continue their fraudulent ways” without the financial penalties and other controls he imposed. Engoron said that Trump and his co-defendants had “failed to accept responsibility” and that experts who testified on his behalf had “simply denied reality.”
“This is a venial sin, not a mortal sin,” Engoron wrote in a searing 92-page opinion. “They did not rob a bank at gunpoint. Donald Trump is not Bernard Madoff. Yet, [the] defendants are incapable of admitting the error of their ways.”
He said that their “complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological” and that “the frauds found here leap off the page and shock the conscience.”
The judge has also barred Trump, who first built his reputation as a real estate titan, from serving as an officer or director of any New York corporation for three years or from getting a loan from banks registered in his native state.
His eldest sons, Trump Organization Executive Vice Presidents Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, were ordered to pay $4 million each and were barred from being officers of New York companies for two years. Former company Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg was ordered to pay $1 million.