In this episode, host Evantz Saint-Gerard interviews Peter J. Goodman, Esq about the changes in property disclosure laws. They discuss the Property Condition Disclosure Act and the new property condition disclosure statement. They explain who the law applies to and the reasons behind its implementation. They also cover the seller’s obligations, liability, and best practices for sellers and buyers. The importance of hiring a real estate attorney and the ability to negotiate contracts with disclosures are emphasized. The episode concludes with information on exclusions from the property condition disclosure, the effective date, and contact information for further inquiries.
In this episode, Evantz Saint-Gerard and Peter J. Goodman discuss the ins and outs of real estate joint ventures. They cover topics such as the definition of a joint venture, the different legal structures available, the legal requirements, financial obligations, dispute resolution mechanisms, exit strategies, risk management, and future trends in the industry. The conversation emphasizes the importance of seeking professional help and creating comprehensive agreements to avoid potential pitfalls and disputes. Overall, the episode provides valuable insights for anyone considering entering into a real estate joint venture.
Secure Your Investment with Expertise 🏠⚖️ Contact Peter J. Goodman, Esq. at Berger, Fischoff, Shumer, Wexler & Goodman, LLP for unparalleled legal guidance. 🌟 Visit www.bfslawfirm.com or call us at 718-934-8811 | 516-747-1136. Your property deserves the best protection!
This conversation discusses the legal aspects and guidance on distressed properties, specifically short sales and foreclosures. The speakers emphasize the importance of seeking help and removing shame when facing financial difficulties. They highlight the need to listen to professionals and follow their advice. Planning and having a backup plan are crucial when selling a distressed property. The short sale process is explained, including considerations for properties with tenants. Dealing with difficult tenants is also addressed. The conversation concludes with a reminder that there is always a way out and contact information for further assistance.
Secure Your Investment with Expertise 🏠⚖️ Contact Peter J. Goodman, Esq. at Berger, Fischoff, Shumer, Wexler & Goodman, LLP for unparalleled legal guidance. 🌟 Visit www.bfslawfirm.com or call us at 718-934-8811 | 516-747-1136. Your property deserves the best protection!
In this conversation, Evan St. Gerard and Peter Goodman discuss how to protect your real estate investment. They cover the importance of title insurance, common misconceptions, the need for professional advice, the role of a real estate attorney, building the right team, negotiating and timing in real estate deals, choosing the right realtor, and the importance of prevention and knowledge in real estate transactions. They also provide words of encouragement for those considering buying and selling real estate.
Secure Your Investment with Expertise 🏠⚖️ Contact Peter J. Goodman, Esq. at Berger, Fischoff, Shumer, Wexler & Goodman, LLP for unparalleled legal guidance. 🌟 Visit www.bfslawfirm.com or call us at 718-934-8811 | 516-747-1136. Your property deserves the best protection!
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani filed for bankruptcy on Thursday in the Southern District of New York, less than one full week after he was ordered to pay $148 million to defamed Georgia poll workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, Moss’ mother.
According to a Bloomberg News report on the filing, Giuliani — who served for some time as attorney to former President Donald Trump — claimed to have just $10 million in assets and up to $500 million in outstanding debt.
Giuliani’s bankruptcy attorneys, Heath Berger and Gary Fischoff, released a statement on Thursday saying that the Chapter 11 protections would give the former mayor the necessary time and breathing room to pursue an appeal in the Georgia case.
“The filing should be a surprise to no one. No person could have reasonably believed that Mayor Giuliani would be able to pay such a high punitive amount,” they said.
Last Friday, after Judge Beryl A. Howell of the Federal District Court in Washington determined that Giuliani had defamed Moss and Freeman in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, a Washington, D.C., jury ordered the former Trump attorney to pay out nearly $150 million:
$16,171,000 to Ruby Freeman for defamation.
$16,998,000 to Shaye Moss for defamation.
$20 million to Freeman for emotional distress.
$20 million to Moss for emotional distress.
$75 million in punitive damages to both plaintiffs.
Giuliani called the ruling “absurd” and promised an immediate appeal, adding, “I don’t regret a damn thing.”
His attorney in the Georgia case, Joe Sibley, said that if future appeals failed, that judgment was enough to ruin his client financially: “the civil equivalent of the death penalty.”
Giuliani still faces additional charges in Georgia — for racketeering and conspiracy — and is also being sued for defamation by both Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic Corp., both of which he had claimed were part of “rigging” the 2020 presidential election in favor of President Joe Biden.
Rudy Giuliani filed for bankruptcy just days after a judge ordered the former New York City mayor to pay $148 million to two Georgia election workers who won a defamation lawsuit suit against him.
Giuliani has suffered financial troubles after representing former President Donald Trump amid Trump’s legal challenges to the 2020 election, which he has claimed was stolen despite a lack of substantial evidence. He has spent millions of dollars defending himself in various legal cases related to alleged attempts to subvert President Joe Biden‘s victory.
His bankruptcy comes after being ordered to pay millions to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, mother-daughter election workers whom he defamed by falsely claiming they committed election fraud while counting ballots in Fulton County in 2020. Giuliani said he does not “regret a damn thing” and has vowed to file an appeal.
Giuliani filed a chapter 11 bankruptcy petition in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York on Thursday, according to court documents. He is facing up to $500 million in debt, according to the bankruptcy filing.
Heath Berger, an attorney listed as representing Giuliani, told Newsweek the filing “should be a surprise to no one.”
“No person could have reasonably believed that Mayor Giuliani would be able to pay such a high punitive amount,” he wrote. “Chapter 11 will afford Mayor Giuliani the opportunity and time to pursue an appeal, while providing transparency for his finances under the supervision of the bankruptcy court, to ensure all creditors are treated equally and fairly throughout the process.”
The former mayor listed his liabilities as somewhere in the range of $100 million and $500 million and his assets as between $1 million and $10 million.
Giuliani owes $989,918 in taxes to the government, according to the filing.
Giuliani Files for Bankruptcy After $148 Million Defamation Loss
(Bloomberg) — Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York who led efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, has filed for bankruptcy, swamped by legal bills stemming from the many false claims he made to keep Donald Trump in the White House.
Giuliani filed papers in New York seeking protection from creditors, listing debts of as much as $500 million and assets of up to $10 million. The filing gives Giuliani a breathing spell from creditors and pauses civil litigation.
The latest blow for Giuliani came on Friday, when he was ordered to pay $148 million to two 2020 Georgia election workers after promoting conspiracy theories falsely accusing them of trying to rig the election against Trump.
“The filing should be a surprise to no one,” Heath Berger and Gary Fischoff, Giuliani’s bankruptcy lawyers, said in a statement. “No person could have reasonably believed that Mayor Giuliani would be able to pay such a high punitive amount.”
Chapter 11 protection will give Giuliani time to pursue an appeal of the Georgia lawsuit while providing transparency and fairness for creditors, the lawyers said.
The jury verdict Dec. 15 followed a trial on damages Giuliani must pay to Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea “Shaye” Moss for harm to their reputations and other impacts, including lost wages and mental anguish.
“The lies Rudy Giuliani told about me and my mommy,” Moss said in front of the courthouse after the verdict, “have changed our lives.”
Several Battles
Giuliani included the $148 million debt from the trial loss in a list of unsecured creditors, which also included $1.36 million in unpaid legal fees that Davidoff Hutcher & Citron sued him over in September and $2 million that a former grocery worker in Staten Island is seeking after he was arrested for patting the former mayor on the back unexpectedly.
Giuliani has been defending himself in multiple courtrooms on matters ranging from criminal charges to civil defamation, running up millions of dollars in fees and expenses. As the costs mounted, Giuliani admitted in a civil case in early August that he was “having financial difficulties” and he asked a judge to put off some payments.
Legal woes for the former US prosecutor include an indictment in Georgia on charges of racketeering and conspiracy. He’s pleaded not guilty. Giuliani also was sued for defamation by voting software companies Dominion Voting Systems Inc. and Smartmatic Corp. over his false claims that they conspired to rig the election against Trump by deleting millions of votes.
The filing lists “unknown” damages against Giuliani in the Dominion and Smartmatic cases. Hunter Biden is also listed as being owed an unknown amount. A Dominion spokesperson said the bankruptcy won’t stop the company from trying to hold Giuliani accountable.
The president’s son sued Giuliani in September for allegedly violating his digital privacy by hacking and manipulating data from his purported laptop. Giuliani illegally accessed a copy of a hard drive that Biden allegedly left at a Delaware repair shop and tampered with the data for financial gain, according to the lawsuit, which seeks unspecified monetary damages.
Giuliani has complained he doesn’t have the money to defend himself in all the cases, and Trump hosted a $100,000 per person fundraiser in September at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, to help the former mayor pay his legal bills.
A three-bedroom apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side Giuliani owns was put up for sale for $6.5 million in July.
Earlier in his career, Giuliani used federal anti-racketeering law to lock up mob bosses and police Wall Street insider trading when he served as US Attorney for the Southern District of New York in the 1980s. It helped vault him to the mayor’s office, and his leadership after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks won global acclaim. He sought the Republican presidential nomination himself in 2008.
He later joined Trump’s legal team and pushed discredited conspiracy theories in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Legal bills piled up, and his efforts to pay were crimped when his law license was suspended in New York State and in the District of Columbia. He subsequently faced disbarment proceedings.
The bankruptcy may not allow Giuliani to completely avoid paying the court judgments against him. Certain kinds of debts, like those related to intentional fraud, cannot be eliminated under the US Bankruptcy Code.
The case is Rudolph W. Giuliani, 23-12055, US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
–With assistance from Elizabeth Wasserman, Chris Strohm, Erik Larson, Chris Dolmetsch, Steven Church and Amelia Pollard.
Rudy Giuliani has filed for bankruptcy in New York, one day after a judge ordered him to immediately start paying the nearly $150 million in damages he owes two former Georgia election workers over defamatory claims about the 2020 presidential election.
Giuliani, who helped spearhead Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, estimated his liabilities as being from $100 million to $500 million in his filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. For the estimated worth of his assets, he put $1,000,001 to $10 million.
Giuliani’s bankruptcy lawyers said in a statement that the filing “should be a surprise to no one.”
The attorneys, Heath Berger and Gary Fischoff, added: “No person could have reasonably believed that Mayor Giuliani would be able to pay such a high punitive amount” from the Georgia defamation case.
Last week, a federal jury in Washington awarded $148 million to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss after harrowing testimony from the mother and daughter about how their lives were upended by Giuliani’s lies. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell reduced the jury’s award by roughly $2 million but ordered Trump’s onetime personal lawyer to start paying.
Giuliani had been subject to a customary 30-day waiting period before payment is enforced, but Freeman and Moss asked the judge to waive that pause. They argued that Giuliani already had failed to pay court-ordered fees he owed them and that he is saddled by other legal debt. They also said he could have potentially used the waiting period to hide his assets.
“Chapter 11 will afford Mayor Giuliani the opportunity and time to pursue an appeal, while providing transparency for his finances under the supervision of the bankruptcy court, to ensure all creditors are treated equally and fairly throughout the process,” Giuliani’s lawyers said in their statement.
However, bankruptcy protection cannot stave off all of Giuliani’s debts. As my MSNBC colleague Jordan Rubin explained earlier this week:
Notably, Giuliani can’t automatically make his obligation to Freeman and Moss disappear simply by declaring bankruptcy, because bankruptcy protections don’t apply to willful and malicious conduct, as Alex Jones learned in the Sandy Hook case recently. And plaintiffs have ways they can go after civil defendants, such as by garnishments and liens.
Rudy Giuliani filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in New York on Thursday, citing debts that include a nearly $150 million recent civil judgment for defaming two Georgia election workers while serving as a lawyer for former President Donald Trump.
The filing by Giuliani came a day after a federal judge in Washington, D.C., ordered him to begin paying election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss monetary damages, and three days after they filed a new suit seeking to bar him from again defaming the mother and daughter.
The U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan filing legally pauses, for now, the $146 million defamation judgment against the former New York City mayor that resulted from a jury verdict last week.
Giuliani, while representing Trump in efforts to reverse his loss on the heels of the 2020 election, falsely accused Freeman and Moss of ballot fraud. The claims sparked death threats against them.
Their attorney, Michael Gottlieb, in a statement about Giuliani’s bankruptcy petition, said, “This maneuver is unsurprising, and it will not succeed in discharging Mr. Giuliani’s debt to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.”
Giuliani’s filing estimates he has assets worth between $1 million and $10 million and estimated current liabilities of between $100 million and $500 million. A worksheet in the filing lists his current actual debts at $151.8 million.
While the defamation judgment is the lion’s share of that total, Giuliani also declared he has nearly $1 million in debt to the IRS and New York State Department of Taxation and Finance for unpaid taxes, and that he owes several million dollars in debts to various law firms.
Giuliani was sued in September by his former lawyer Robert Costello for $1.36 million in unpaid legal fees dating back to late 2019.
The list of nonsecured creditors in the new filing includes plaintiffs currently suing him, among them the Dominion and Smartmatic election machine companies, President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, and former Giuliani employee Noelle Dunphy, who accuses him of sexual harassment and wage theft.
Filers use Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code to reorganize their debts and come up with a plan to pay their creditors.
His bankruptcy lawyers in a statement Thursday said, “The filing should be a surprise to no one.”
“No person could have reasonably believed that Mayor Giuliani would be able to pay such a high punitive amount” from the defamation case, the attorneys, Heath Berger and Gary Fischoff said.
“Chapter 11 will afford Mayor Giuliani the opportunity and time to pursue an appeal, while providing transparency for his finances under the supervision of the bankruptcy court, to ensure all creditors are treated equally and fairly throughout the process,” the lawyers said.
In addition to serving two terms as New York mayor, Giuliani is a former Department of Justice official and former Manhattan U.S. Attorney.
Giuliani was in the final months of his mayoralty on Sept. 11, 2001, when a terror attack leveled the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan.
After being widely lauded for his leadership of the city on the heels of that attack, he made millions of dollars from consulting work and made a failed bid for the White House in 2008.
In recent years, Giuliani has been criticized, sued, and prosecuted for actions during his work as Trump’s lawyer. Since late 2020 he has made false claims that Trump lost to Biden only as a result of widespread ballot fraud.
Earlier this year, Giuliani, Trump, and 17 other people were charged in Georgia court with crimes related to an alleged conspiracy in their efforts to undo his defeat in that state in the 2020 election. Giuliani has pleaded not guilty in that case, as have Trump and most of the other defendants.
In July, the disciplinary board of the D.C. Bar Association recommended that Giuliani be stripped of his law license as a result of his false election fraud claims.
Giuliani’s law license in New York is suspended due to those claims.
