Legal battles

Exclusive: Trump's 3,500 lawsuits unprecedented for a presidential nominee

Donald Trump is a fighter, famous for legal skirmishes over everything from his golf courses to his tax bills to Trump University. But until now, it hasn’t been clear precisely how litigious he is and what that might portend for a Trump presidency.

An exclusive USA TODAY analysis of legal filings across the United States finds that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and his businesses have been involved in at least 3,500 legal actions in federal and state courts during the past three decades. They range from skirmishes with casino patrons to million-dollar real estate suits to personal defamation lawsuits.

The sheer volume of lawsuits is unprecedented for a presidential nominee. No candidate of a major party has had anything approaching the number of Trump’s courtroom entanglements.

Just since he announced his candidacy a year ago, at least 70 new cases have been filed, about evenly divided between lawsuits filed by him and his companies and those filed against them.

Legal battles

Yukos Ruling: How We Got Here

 A district court in The Hague has quashed a $50 billion award that Russia had been ordered to pay the former majority shareholders of the dismantled oil giant Yukos, a major victory for Russia and its effort to portray the dismantling a decade ago as a case of righting past wrongs.  

The Hague court ruled on April 20 that the European arbitration court, which ruled in July 2014, misinterpreted a treaty that Russia signed but never ratified and wasn't qualified to issue the award to Yukos's former owners.

The July 2014 award was the largest ever issued by an arbitration court anywhere.

Yukos was once Russia's largest oil company until its co-founder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was imprisoned, and its most profitable assets sold off in dubious auctions. 

Legal battles

Hague Court Disallows Ruling for Russia to Pay $50Bln to Yukos Stakeholders

The Hague Court has disallowed an earlier ruling by a court of arbitration obliging Russia to pay $50 billion to the former stakeholders of the defunct Yukos oil company as the court was not in line with its competency, according to a statement on the Dutch judicial system's website.

"The Hague District Court has quashed six arbitration awards (three interim awards and three final awards) of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. In the final awards, the Russian Federation was ordered to pay damages amounting to 50 billion US dollars to Yukos Universal Limited, Hulley Enterprises Limited and Veteran Petroleum Limited. The three parties had been shareholders of the bankrupted Russian oil company Yukos. With the arbitration awards quashed, the Russian Federation is no longer liable for paying compensation to these parties," the statement read.

In July 2014, the Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled unanimously to award the former shareholders of the now defunct Yukos company $50 billion to be paid by the Russian Federation.