Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Billionaire Ira Rennert Ordered To Pay $213M Over Hamptons Mansion Scheme

A federal appeals court said billionaire Ira Rennert must pay a $213.2 million judgment after a jury found him liable for looting his now-defunct magnesium company to build one of the country’s most expensive homes, a 21-bedroom mansion in New York’s Hamptons.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday let stand a jury verdict against the mining mogul

Rennert, 82, is worth $4.1 billion, Forbes magazine said.

Jurors had in February 2015 found Rennert and Renco liable for $118 million to the bankruptcy estate of MagCorp, which had sought protection from creditors in 2001.

Buchwald had contended that Rennert diverted money from MagCorp to help build his estimated 43,000-square-foot mansion, known as Fair Field, on 65 oceanfront acres in Sagaponack, on New York’s Long Island.

Rennert denied that allegation. The property was valued last March at $248.5 million, according to the Town of Southampton assessment roll.

Last March, Renco agreed to pay in full the pensions of about 1,350 retirees at its bankrupt RG Steel unit. That ended a lawsuit in which the U.S. Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp accused Renco of trying to evade $70 million of obligations.—Reuters

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.