Engoron Hits Trump With $355 Million Civil Fraud Judgment and a Three-Year New York Business Ban

The Judgment

On Friday, February 16, 2024, New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron issued a 93-page ruling in People of the State of New York v. Trump that ordered Donald Trump to disgorge $355 million in profits obtained through fraud — and tacked on more than $98 million in pre-judgment interest at New York’s 9% statutory rate. When the judgment was formally entered the following week, the total had grown to over $464 million, with another $114,000 added every day it went unpaid.

Engoron found Trump liable for a decade-long scheme of inflating the value of his properties on annual financial statements submitted to banks and insurers to obtain favorable loan terms. He ordered the same penalty package against the rest of the Trump Organization’s inner circle. Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, each named on those statements as executives of the family business, were ordered to pay $4 million apiece and barred from serving as officers or directors of any New York company for two years. Longtime Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg and former controller Jeffrey McConney were each fined $1 million and given lifetime bans from serving in financial-management roles for any New York company.

Trump himself was barred for three years from serving as an officer or director of any New York corporation — including, on paper, the Trump Organization, the family business he had run for half a century — and from applying for loans from any New York-chartered or registered financial institution.

”Pathological”

The portion of the opinion that drew the most attention was Engoron’s verdict on the defendants as people. “Their complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological,” he wrote. The defendants, he found, were “incapable of admitting the error of their ways” and were therefore likely to commit fraud again. That was the legal basis for the bans on running New York businesses: not deterrence in the abstract, but a specific finding that Trump and his sons would do it again if allowed.

The trial that produced that verdict had given Engoron plenty to work with. Trump took the stand and used most of his testimony to attack the judge, his clerk, and Attorney General Letitia James, drawing repeated rebukes for non-responsive answers. Engoron imposed three separate gag orders during the proceedings after Trump publicly attacked his law clerk by name, with one of those orders backed up by $15,000 in personal fines against Trump for violations. Weisselberg, who had already served jail time for tax fraud in a separate Manhattan DA prosecution of the Trump Organization, gave the court testimony so evasive that prosecutors later charged him with perjury for it.

What the Numbers Mean

Reduced to its essence, the case was about something Donald Trump has done his entire career and bragged about doing. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, valued by Palm Beach County for tax purposes at roughly $18 million, appeared on his financial statements at valuations as high as $739 million. The size of his Trump Tower triplex was reported to lenders as nearly three times its actual square footage. Properties were valued at prices that assumed restrictions on their use did not exist — restrictions Trump himself had signed. The fraud was not a matter of optimistic appraisals at the margins. It was a pattern of consistent, documented inflation, on legal documents that bankers and insurers relied on, sustained over a decade by an organization Trump personally controlled.

The state did not have to prove a victim lost money — that is not what New York Executive Law § 63(12) requires. It had to prove a pattern of persistent fraud. Engoron found it had, in spades.

How It Fits the Pattern

This was the largest financial penalty ever levied against Donald Trump. It came eight months after the Carroll defamation jury awarded $5 million for sexual abuse, four months before the Manhattan jury convicted him of 34 felonies, and against the backdrop of two federal indictments and one Georgia indictment then still pending. None of that was coincidence. The financial fraud case rested on the same business culture — falsified records, sworn statements treated as marketing copy, executives who lied to protect the boss — that produced the Stormy Daniels hush-money cover-up and the Mar-a-Lago documents case. The Trump Organization that Engoron found “pathologically” incapable of remorse is the same family business that pleaded guilty to 17 felonies in 2022 over its decade-long tax-fraud scheme.

Trump’s appeal stalled the judgment but not the finding. In August 2025, a New York appeals court upheld the lower court’s determination that Trump and the company had committed fraud, while throwing out the dollar penalty as constitutionally excessive — leaving the liability intact and the question of damages alive for further review. Engoron’s underlying record — the fraud, the unrepentance, the unsuitability to run a New York business — is now part of the permanent legal record of a serving U.S. president.