oder morgen früh.
Samaha's personal liability to increase in Intertainment case
Ross Johnson in Los Angeles 16 August 2004 04:00
...On Friday in a Santa Ana, California federal courtroom, what may be the biggest bomb in a movie career filled with them was aimed squarely at Franchise Pictures CEO Elie Samaha.
That's when Judge Alicemarie Stotler issued tentative rulings pertaining to next week's formal judgments in the matter of German rights broker Intertainment GmbH's lawsuit against Franchise.
In June, it looked like Samaha had dodged a bullet when the jury assigned the $77 million compensatory damage award entirely to Franchise LLC, and nothing to Samaha personally or the 18 one-off Franchise production companies that hold the copyrights to the Franchise-Intertainment slate of films.
But according to Stotler, she is now inclined to approve a judgment where all the Franchise defendants, including Samaha, are jointly and severally liable for the entire $77 million compensatory damage award.
And in a move that had Franchise lawyers reeling, Stotler also placed alter ego liability against the Franchise defendants. That means that, due to the way Stotler now sees things, Samaha may have to pony up tens of millions of dollars out of his own pocket to pay for the budget fraud to Intertainment CEO Rudiger " Barry" Baeres and his company.
In June, Samaha had " wished Barry luck" in collecting the $77 million compensatory award from Franchise LLC, which is currently an empty shell. And the one-off production companies that hold the copyrights to the Franchise slate are buried in over $200 million of debt owed to Franchise lender Comerica Bank and Warner Bros., which released the Franchise slate in North America via a " rent-a-studio" distribution deal.
But if Stotler sticks to her guns when she enters the judgment next week, Baeres and Intertainment now will be able to go after Samaha personally for the entire $77 million in compensatory damages if there's no money left in the other Franchise companies.
Samaha is also on the hook personally for $4 million in punitive damages that the jury assigned to him in June. The jury also assigned $1 million in punitive damages to Franchise LLC, and $24 million in punitives against the 18 one-off companies.
Franchise lawyer William Price told Screen International that Stotler will have " changed the scoreboard" if she alters the $77 million jury compensatory awards that assigned nothing to Samaha personally; and Price says that, via post-trial motions or appeals, Samaha can fight any change by Stotler in the jury rulings.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, a former Franchise executive said that Samaha is now under even more pressure to testify against Comerica Bank in Intertainment's upcoming arbitration against Comerica and completion bond companies Film Finances and Worldwide Film Completion.
Intertainment is seeking $100 million in damages from the companies after claiming they conspired with Franchise to defraud Intertainment via the budget-pumping scheme. On the other side, Comerica is seeking $72 million in cash guarantees that Intertainment refused to pay when Franchise delivered some of the films in the litigation.
" There's no way Samaha can get out of this without testifying against the bank," says the source.
Samaha, who testified at trial that he presently has a negative net worth of $10 million, could not be reached for comment at presstime. He has long maintained that Comerica executives Morgan Rector and Jared Underwood, who are co-defendants in the Intertainment lawsuit against Comerica, had no knowledge of any budget fraud in the Franchise-Intertainment productions..."
( Quelle: screen daily.com)
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