The Big Apple will suffer long-term from this nonsense:
Behind the scenes, New York investors are silently hand-wringing over the possible long-term effects of a judge’s massive fraud ruling against former President Donald Trump. Although investors won’t publicly admit it, the case is having a chilling effect, said Charles Trzcinka, professor of finance, Indiana University-Bloomington. “If you talk to people in this market, they are very, very upset … and these are people who are neutral or even opposed to Trump,” Trzcinka told The Epoch Times. “They’re just angry about it.”
Trzcinka places students into the corporate lending market in New York, making him aware of trends there.
On Monday, an appeals court’s decision to slash the bond by 60 percent, to $175 million, still left the original history-making judgment intact while Trump continues a legal challenge of Justice Arthur Engoron’s ruling last month. Engoron ruled that Trump and his associates overvalued their assets. But Trzcinka said anyone who thinks Trump’s activities in that case were irregular or fraudulent may lack an understanding of typical New York business transactions.
A source familiar with the case explained to The Epoch Times that, normally, business-related cases are handled in the New York courts’ commercial division.
New York Attorney General Letitia James found a novel way to use the state’s anti-fraud law and, as a result, the cases did not go the usual route to the “commercial division.” There, cases are decided by judges who have specific, “sophisticated” knowledge of standard business practices.
Researchers examined other New York alleged fraud cases over a 70-year period and found the Trump case stands alone. The Trump Organization was the only company that confronted possibly being forced out of business despite having no proof of an obvious victim suffering major financial harm. As a result of that unusual use of the law, the case was channeled to a court that would rarely, if ever, handle business-related matters. Thus, the source said: “This case proceeded in just a highly irregular fashion from the start.”
The original $464 million bond amount included a $363 million judgment that Engoron levied against Trump and his associates, plus 9 percent interest. The case promises to continue discouraging investors from doing business in the Empire State, Trczinka and two other knowledgeable sources told The Epoch Times. That’s not only because of the crippling amounts involved, the sources said, but also because Trump and his associates were behaving within the bounds of normal business practice and victimized no one. “All the parties under this civil case were satisfied,” Trczinka said. Yet James “brought a case without a victim” and secured a judgment approaching $500 million. “I have never heard of a victimless civil case that even won five hundred dollars,” Trzcinka said, let alone hundreds of millions of dollars.
Businesspeople are afraid to express concerns about the ramifications aloud. Doing so would paint targets on their backs—an underlying reason why Trump was unable to persuade bonding companies or banks to cover the original $464 million bond, Trczinka and the sources said.