An Ontario Superior Court Justice has rejected legal efforts to rescind deals on behalf of investors in pricey hotel-condo units in Toronto’s Trump International Hotel & Tower, saying buyers knew that “all investments are risky.”

Justice Paul Perell makes clear in his 49-page judgment that marketing materials provided to buyers — setting out potential revenues that could be generated based on projected occupancies and room rates of more than $500 a night — were “deceptive documents.”

But they did not constitute an “investment contract” and they did not breach an Ontario Securities Commission ruling that set out specific conditions for how Talon International, developer of the hotel, was to market the unusual hotel-condo suites, the court found.

In a sort of buyer-beware ruling released late Friday, Justice Perell seems to take the view that it was ultimately up to buyers to do the math for themselves and review legal documents more carefully.

He notes that some who had serious concerns about unexpected fees and thousands of dollars per month in losses on the units, right from the minute the glitzy hotel opened in January, 2012, took occupancy anyway.

Perell also dismissed allegations that billionaire hotelier and would-be U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump should be held personally responsible for any investor issues: A number of buyers have said they bought units largely because the hotel was a Trump enterprise.

Perell called it “some form of guilt by association” noting that Trump’s corporation simply licensed the Trump name to Talon International, the rookie developers of the oft-delayed project.

Trump’s lawyer, Alan Garten, called the ruling “a vindication of my client and the company. The judge made it pretty clear that he has no liability to any of these buyers and was named just because his name is on the building.”

“Talon is pleased they can continue with their landmark Trump Toronto project and feel vindicated,” said Talon lawyer Symon Zucker.

Mitchell Wine, the lawyer for some 22 investors, just two of whom were cited in the ruling as they are test cases for all the others, said his clients were “obviously disappointed” and will consider an appeal.

The investors, some of whom borrowed from their aged parents for down payments, had been seeking damages of $200,000 to $1 million, based on the costs of their hotel suites and the mounting, monthly losses.

The ruling, which comes after a two-day hearing in late June, also dismisses any personal liability in the case by Talon chairman Alex Shnaider and former company president Val Levitan, the executive who prepared marketing materials that were used to woo investors, many of them first-time condo buyers.

Those materials, presented in power point presentations and handouts, were meant to assure potential buyers that they could make big money by renting out the hotel-condo units, based on projected room rates of $500+ per day and occupancy rates of 75 per cent to a worst-case scenario of 55 per cent.

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Those estimates were “uninformed and ill-informed opinions, and his (Levitan’s) figures were essentially just pick-a-number speculation about what might be charged and what might happen in the marketplace,” says the ruling.

In fact, the project suffered so many delays that by the time it opened, it was faced with a raft of other five-star competition and ended up having to discount room rates considerably to boost lower-than-expected occupancy, court was told.

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