Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on When fraudulently inflating goes wrong.
It depends how you look at it, I suppose. Disgorgement is a funny remedy in some ways.
Usually civil damages are compensatory — the court is attempting to make the plaintiff whole for a loss it suffered. That’s not what this is, of course. As the Trump defense team insisted repeatedly, the plaintiff in this case (the state of New York) didn’t suffer any monetary loss here. The state can say it was “harmed” in the sense that it has a general interest in promoting fair and honest business practices in its jurisdiction, but that’s a rather amorphous type of harm. The banks who loaned the money … Read the rest