Af­ter near­ly two decades of lit­i­ga­tion, a Flori­da ap­peals court has up­held a ju­ry ver­dict against Steve Fer­gu­son, find­ing him li­able for fraud, con­spir­a­cy, and vi­o­la­tions of Flori­da’s Civ­il RI­CO law over in­flat­ed con­tracts tied to the con­struc­tion of the Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port.

The Third Dis­trict Court of Ap­peal in Mi­a­mi af­firmed the 2022 judg­ment of $131,318,840.47 against Fer­gu­son, rul­ing that Trinidad and To­ba­go had proven it suf­fered a do­mes­tic in­jury in Flori­da as a re­sult of the con­spir­a­cy.

Fer­gu­son, an Amer­i­can cit­i­zen who chaired Trinidad and To­ba­go’s Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny dur­ing the project, ar­gued the coun­try could not bring its claim un­der Flori­da’s Civ­il RI­CO Act be­cause any in­jury oc­curred abroad. His lawyers main­tained that the law did not ap­ply ex­trater­ri­to­ri­al­ly and re­quired proof of a “do­mes­tic in­jury,” which they said Trinidad and To­ba­go had not shown.