US Court fines Donald Trump over $350 million, bars him from running businesses in New York

A United States court in New York on Friday fined former president, Donald Trump for over $350 million and barred him from engaging in any business related activities in the state for the next three years.

The ruling was delivered by Judge Arthur Engoron in a civil business fraud trial against Donald Trump and his company.

According to NBC news, Judge Arthur Engoron ordered the former president and the Trump Organization to pay over $350 million in damages, and bars Trump “from serving as an officer or director of any New York corporation or other legal entity in New York for a period of three years.”

He also continued “the appointment of an Independent Monitor” and ordered “the installation of an Independent Director of Compliance” for the company.

The judgement is Trump’s second this year, following a $83.3 million verdict in writer E. Jean Carroll’s defamation action against him last month.

The former president may also face four criminal trials this year as his presidential campaign moves closer to the November election, the first of which is scheduled to begin on March 25th in New York state court.

Letitia James, the New York Attorney General, had sought $370 million against Trump, his firm, and its senior executives, including his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, charging repeated and persistent fraud that included fabricating business records and financial statements. James contended that the financial statements were sometimes overestimated by up to $2.2 billion.

James said the defendants used the false financial statements to secure bank loans and insurance policies at rates he would not have been eligible for, and reaped hundreds of millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains.

Trump had maintained his financial statements were conservative, and has called the AG’s allegations politically motivated and a “fraud on me.”

“This is a case that should have never been brought, and I think we should be entitled to damages,” Trump told reporters when he attended closing arguments in the case on January 11.

Meanwhile in October 2023, Donald Trump was also fined $10,000 after the judge found that the former U.S. president violated a gag order in the case for a second time.

Justice Arthur Engoron also fined him $5,000 after finding that he had not taken down a post disparaging the judge’s law clerk.

Engoron had earlier barred Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination to challenge Democratic President Joe Biden in the 2024 U.S. election, from making comments attacking court staff.

The civil trial, which lasted months, featured testimony from Trump and his oldest children. The former president was aggressive on the witness stand, labelling James a hack and the court “extremely hostile.”

Among the examples cited as fraud by the attorney general’s office during the trial was Trump valuing his triplex home in Trump Tower in New York City at three times its actual size and value, as well as including a brand value to increase the valuation of his golf courses on the financial statements, which explicitly said brand values were not included.