NYLJ 6/20/07
4.RICO CLAIM PROCEEDS AGAINST LIQUOR COMPANIES
4. Ah, ‘tis enough to drive a murderin’, thievin’ boss of a drug cartel t’drink!
When government bribes fail, you’d think you could at least count in a solid business relationship to maintain the alliance against the bureaucrats.
But no, you say help the makers and distributors or Smirnoff and Tanq and—lord help us—Guinness, not to mention…well, hell yes! Let’s mention just Pernod-Richard and let you fill in the blanks, but that isn’t going to save you from a RICO investigation and prosecution when you’re found to be playing “scratch-my-back” with Columbian traffickers in narcotics. There may be better ways to outsell the government brands, but none quite as good. Money-laundering, that’s what they called it, and price-fixing via cheaper, and illegal, methods of distribution.
And even if I must face the revenue rule, common law doctrine which prevents the courts of one sovereign nation from enforcing the tax claims of another, I can readily dismiss the tax issue and allow the bulk of the suit to proceed. It is all well and good to say: My country right or wrong, and my taxes as well. But when a sovereign state brings a suit as a commercial actor, it should have the same rights or wrongs as any other capitalist. And we don’t want to set a precedent, now do we?
Of course, to win the suit it would have to show that their lost sales were directly attributable to the money-laundering. And those closing arguments would have to be heard elsewhere.
But, for now, last call has been given at these taps.
Showing posts with label RICO statutes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label RICO statutes. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Thursday, February 4, 2010
FEDERAL JUDGE REJECTS PRINCE’S RICO CLAIM
NYLJ 5/23/07
2. FEDERAL JUDGE REJECTS PRINCE’S RICO CLAIM
2. It is always a hoot and pretty much moot when one of the richest men in the world brings a racketeering suit. The first thing any jurist packing a gavel must quip is: takes one to know one, eh?
With a moniker like Duli Yang Termat Mulia Paduka Seri Penigram Muda Haji Jefri Bolkiah how you get called Prince Jefri is probably a story in itself. But when you plead as Cedar Swamp Holdings v. Zamin, 06 Civ. 13626, in the Southern District of New York, there’s a great likelihood that the court officers will probably call you the Duke of Paduka, anyways.
This brother of the sultan of Brunei put his investments in the hands of this husband-&-wife team of English barristers, who probably put down their own prayer carpets to Allah to offer orisons for their good fortune. That their own diversified portfolio extended to buying and selling real estate, while acting as both agents of the purchaser and the sellers themselves, churning paper to up their compensation on deals, hiring wifey’s brother to a management position on one of the properties, as well as brokering below-market lenses, even, meant that they were busy little beavers during the two years of their employment by the Prince. But that does not come in under the heading of “mob related activities”.
“The Court recognizes that the RICO statute was intended to cast a wide net and that even loosely-affiliated individuals with little organizational structure can constitute an enterprise where the group exists solely for carrying out a pattern of racketeering activity. But it is not persuaded that the group constituting the alleged ‘enterprise’ in this case is anything other than a laundry list of individuals and entities connected to the alleged schemes of the defendants.
“Moreover, the Courts have held that allegations of a ‘hub-&-spoke’ structure do not satisfy the enterprise element of the RICO claim. That requires a plaintiff to allege that the defendants operated symbiotically and played necessary roles in the achievement of a common purpose.”
We don’t have any trouble defining a hierarchy in criminal enterprise—at least not since the Sopranos ended up in sanitized syndication—but look at this loose aggregation of isolated and independent individuals is to see an adhoc coalition of entities who just happened to luck out. That Prince Jefri decided to drop all this on the laps of the barristers is the same thing as walking into a dominatrix dungeon and saying: Hurt Me. What chafes is that you let it go on, either co-signing their bullshit or worse—giving them a durable Power of Attorney over unspecified real properties—was the sexual equivalent of adding, Oh, and I don’t need a ‘safe word’.
Yes, almost any One-L student and probably any number of paralegals could have looked at this and given it the same SJ: You may have longball hitters at your firm but that is dependent on you getting one over the plate, so to speak. This wasn’t even in the right ballpark.
So, from the bench view, it would be the Duke of Paduka becomes the palooka, or Mother of Mercy, this IS the end of RICO…in this action. (Which only means that a half-hour after this gets tossed they are filing the same 23 of 24 claims in Civil.)
2. FEDERAL JUDGE REJECTS PRINCE’S RICO CLAIM
2. It is always a hoot and pretty much moot when one of the richest men in the world brings a racketeering suit. The first thing any jurist packing a gavel must quip is: takes one to know one, eh?
With a moniker like Duli Yang Termat Mulia Paduka Seri Penigram Muda Haji Jefri Bolkiah how you get called Prince Jefri is probably a story in itself. But when you plead as Cedar Swamp Holdings v. Zamin, 06 Civ. 13626, in the Southern District of New York, there’s a great likelihood that the court officers will probably call you the Duke of Paduka, anyways.
This brother of the sultan of Brunei put his investments in the hands of this husband-&-wife team of English barristers, who probably put down their own prayer carpets to Allah to offer orisons for their good fortune. That their own diversified portfolio extended to buying and selling real estate, while acting as both agents of the purchaser and the sellers themselves, churning paper to up their compensation on deals, hiring wifey’s brother to a management position on one of the properties, as well as brokering below-market lenses, even, meant that they were busy little beavers during the two years of their employment by the Prince. But that does not come in under the heading of “mob related activities”.
“The Court recognizes that the RICO statute was intended to cast a wide net and that even loosely-affiliated individuals with little organizational structure can constitute an enterprise where the group exists solely for carrying out a pattern of racketeering activity. But it is not persuaded that the group constituting the alleged ‘enterprise’ in this case is anything other than a laundry list of individuals and entities connected to the alleged schemes of the defendants.
“Moreover, the Courts have held that allegations of a ‘hub-&-spoke’ structure do not satisfy the enterprise element of the RICO claim. That requires a plaintiff to allege that the defendants operated symbiotically and played necessary roles in the achievement of a common purpose.”
We don’t have any trouble defining a hierarchy in criminal enterprise—at least not since the Sopranos ended up in sanitized syndication—but look at this loose aggregation of isolated and independent individuals is to see an adhoc coalition of entities who just happened to luck out. That Prince Jefri decided to drop all this on the laps of the barristers is the same thing as walking into a dominatrix dungeon and saying: Hurt Me. What chafes is that you let it go on, either co-signing their bullshit or worse—giving them a durable Power of Attorney over unspecified real properties—was the sexual equivalent of adding, Oh, and I don’t need a ‘safe word’.
Yes, almost any One-L student and probably any number of paralegals could have looked at this and given it the same SJ: You may have longball hitters at your firm but that is dependent on you getting one over the plate, so to speak. This wasn’t even in the right ballpark.
So, from the bench view, it would be the Duke of Paduka becomes the palooka, or Mother of Mercy, this IS the end of RICO…in this action. (Which only means that a half-hour after this gets tossed they are filing the same 23 of 24 claims in Civil.)
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