Motorola Credit Corp. v. Uzan

274 F. Supp. 2d 481, 2003 WL 21757706
CourtDistrict Court, S.D. New York
DecidedAugust 8, 2003
Docket02 CIV.666 JSR
StatusPublished
Cited by31 cases

This text of 274 F. Supp. 2d 481 (Motorola Credit Corp. v. Uzan) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering District Court, S.D. New York primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Motorola Credit Corp. v. Uzan, 274 F. Supp. 2d 481, 2003 WL 21757706 (S.D.N.Y. 2003).

Opinion

OPINION and ORDER

RAKOFF, District Judge.

As the Court of Appeals has noted, “[t]his case raises a host of unusual [legal] questions.... ” Motorola Credit Corporation v. Uzan, 322 F.3d 130, 134 (2d Cir.2003). Part I of this Opinion and Order resolves such of those questions as are presently ripe for decision. No legal *490 thicket, however, can hide the fact that all the credible evidence before the Court proves that the defendants — in particular, the members of the Uzan family — have perpetrated a huge fraud. Under the guise of obtaining financing for a Turkish telecommunications company, the Uzans have siphoned more than a billion dollars of plaintiffs’ money into their own pockets and into the coffers of other entities they control. Having fraudulently induced the loans, they have sought to advance and conceal their scheme through an almost endless series of lies, threats, and chicanery, including, among much else, filing false criminal charges against high level American and Finnish executives, grossly diluting and weakening the collateral for the loans, and repeatedly disobeying the orders of this Court. Part II of this Opinion and Order details the overwhelming evidence of this misconduct and the legal consequences that flow therefrom, including, among much else, an award of damages in excess of $4 billion and an order for the arrest and confinement of the individual defendants should they be brought within the jurisdiction of the Court.

Before turning to any of this, however, a brief background is in order. Plaintiff Motorola Credit Corporation (“MCC”) is the financing affiliate of Motorola, Inc., a major provider of telecommunications equipment and services. Co-plaintiff Nokia Corporation (“Nokia”) is another major telecommunications manufacturer. Nokia’s financial arrangements, so far as here relevant, were handled through the Stockholm Branch of ABN-AMRO Bank N.V. (“ABN-AMRO Bank”).

The defendants are the five leading members of the Uzan family, namely Kemal Uzan, Cem Cengiz Uzan, Murat Hakan Uzan, Melahat Uzan, and Aysegul Akay (collectively, the “Uzans”), their associate Antonio Luna Betancourt, and three Uzan-controlled companies, namely, Unikom Ile-tism Hizmetleri Pazarlama A.S., Standart Pazarlama A.S., and Standart Telekomuni-kasyon Bilgisayar Hizmetleri A.S. (“Stan-dart Telekom”). Directly or indirectly, the Uzans — reputedly among the richest families in the world, see e.g., L. Kroll, The World’s Billionaires, Forbes, Feb. 28, 2002—also control more than 130 other companies, including, of particular relevance here, a telecommunications company named Telsim Mobil Telekomunikayson Hizmetleri A.S. (“Telsim”).

Between April 1998 and September 2000, the Uzans fraudulently induced MCC and Nokia to transfer to Telsim approximately $2.7 billion, supposedly to finance a major expansion of Telsim’s operations. Actually, however, the Uzans intended to divert a large part of these funds to other entities they controlled and to their own pockets, so as to fund their economic empire and to pay for such personal items as private airplanes, yachts, helicopters, and multimillion dollar apartments in New York and elsewhere. Although defendants’ refusal to provide much of the Court-ordered discovery leaves uncertain the full extent of the fraudulent diversion, it amounts at least to $1 billion, involving the direct transfer of $450 million from Telsim to other Uzan-controlled entities in Turkey, a separate diversion of $133 million from Telsim to certain Uzan-controlled entities in the Netherlands Antilles, and still another $552 million diversion through the device of inflated “Telsim” expenses payable to Uzan-controlled entities. Ultimately, it appears that as much as $300 million found its way into the Uzans’ personal bank accounts.

Plaintiffs were slower to uncover this fraud than they otherwise might have been because the defendants provided them with false financial information about Tel-sim, because the defendants falsely repre *491 sented that further financing from third parties was imminent, and, most especially, because the plaintiffs thought they were protected by substantial collateral. Specifically, the Uzans had arranged for still another of their companies, Rumeli Telefon Sistemleri A.S. (“Rumeli Telefon”), which at that time owned about three-quarters of Telsim’s outstanding shares, to pledge virtually all those shares to the plaintiffs as collateral for the plaintiffs’ loans to Telsim. But in April 2001, the Uzans, knowing that they could no longer stave off default, convened a secret meeting of Telsim’s shareholders at which they diluted the economic value of Rumeli Tele-fon’s shares in Telsim to a third of what it had previously been and transferred majority control of Telsim from Rumeli Tele-fon to Standart Telekom. A few months later, at another secret meeting, they stripped the remaining collateral of its voting rights and took other steps to further dimmish its value.

Meanwhile, plaintiffs, having finally declared Telsim in default, sent financial investigators to Turkey to try to uncover the truth. The Uzans retaliated by filing criminal complaints against high ranking executives of Nokia, Motorola, Inc., and Motorola Turkey (Motorola, Inc.’s local affiliate), falsely charging the executives with threatening to kill the Uzans. But, despite these and other impediments, plaintiffs eventually uncovered enough evidence of the fraud to commence the instant lawsuit.

The complaint, filed in January, 2002, charged the defendants with federal acts of racketeering, state claims of fraud, and other serious misconduct. Early in the case, the Court issued injunctive relief for the purpose of maintaining the status quo, including the preservation of what little was left of the collateral. But, the defendants contemptuously refused to obey the Court’s orders, in one case even breaking their sworn promise not to further eviscerate the collateral. The defendants also repeatedly reneged on promises to provide discovery ordered by Magistrate Judge Maas (to whom certain aspects of the pretrial preparation of the case were assigned), and instructed their counsel not to reveal to this Court or the Court of Appeals secret steps they were taking in Turkey to obtain ex parte orders undercutting the prior orders of this Court. Additionally, the defendants, though not themselves parties to any arbitration agreement with either of the plaintiffs, demanded that the instant disputes be submitted to Swiss arbitration pursuant to arbitration agreements between Telsim and MCC and between Telsim and ABN-AMRO Bank.

Notwithstanding these difficulties, the Court conducted two evidentiary hearings and a trial, at which the aforementioned facts, and much else, were established. Subsequent to the trial, however, the Court of Appeals, to which the defendants had appealed from the Court’s preliminary injunction order, determined that those of plaintiffs’ claims brought under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (“RICO”), 18 U.S.C. § 1961 et seq., must be dismissed as unripe — without prejudice, however, to their being reinstated when they become ripe.

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Bluebook (online)
274 F. Supp. 2d 481, 2003 WL 21757706, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/motorola-credit-corp-v-uzan-nysd-2003.