When most New Yorkers wake up, they might splurge by spending a few bucks on coffee and a bagel.
Every morning Donald Trump wakes up, he now owes another $87,500 in interest on the massive legal penalties he received last week.
The pain is set to continue until he pays off the entirety of the nearly half a billion dollars in fines and interest in his Manhattan civil fraud case.
The devastating judgment handed down by state Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron on Friday against the former president and his longtime Trump Organization executives will increase by 9% annually until resolved.
That comes to $87,500 per day, according to the state attorney general’s office — more than most New Yorkers make in a year. On an annual basis, the interest alone puts a $32 million dent in Trump’s pocket, according to calculations by The Associated Press.
Engoron’s blistering ruling found the Republican front runner for president, his former finance chief, Allen Weisselberg, company controller Jeff McConney, and sons, Eric and Don Jr., liable for six claims alleging they intentionally committed fraud by routinely lying about how much he was worth — often by billions of dollars — in deals with financial institutions. Engoron found Trump and his crew liable on the top fraud claim before the months-long trial even started.
Trump is on the hook for the overwhelming bulk of the roughly $364 million in pre-interest penalties laid out in Engoron’s ruling, which also barred him from heading a New York business for three years, among other restrictions.
Specifically, the judge’s decision ordered Trump and the entities he owns and controls to pay back a whopping $168,040,168. That represents the interest he saved from lying about his net worth in loans involving his Doral golf resort in Florida, the Old Post Office hotel in Washington, D.C., his Wall Street skyscraper and his Chicago hotel….
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