It is certainly hard to keep the various venues and facets of Deutsche Bank’s now 15-year-long battle with billionaire Alexander Vik in order and understanding. After all, they involve numerous lawsuits and one criminal case against the Monaco-based billionaire in the High Court of Justice and Court of Appeal in London, the Court of Probate and Enforcement Court in Oslo, and the Connecticut Supreme Court—thanks to Vik’s owning a Greenwich mansion—as well as courts in Delaware, New York and Pennsylvania.
At issue—initially, anyway—were some money-losing foreign exchange deals by Vik’s Sebastian Holdings during the financial crisis. Since then, the legal morass has grown to include Vik’s alleged attempts to avoid paying the other DB by shifting assets away from Sebastian and otherwise interfering with the bank’s attempts to get paid, including by monkeying around with shares of a Norwegian software company Vik controls.
In the British courts, Vik hasn’t had much luck, first being order to pay Deutsche Bank nearly £300 million, and then being held in contempt of said courts for lying about what he knows about Sebastian’s assets. Nor have the judges in his native Norway been especially amenable, declaring the British judgment enforceable in the country and cancelling Vik’s transfer of Confirmit shares—which the British court ordered sold to satisfy Deutsche Bank’s judgment—from Sebastian to himself and his father.
But in the Nutmeg State, Vik has been a bit more fortunate. Connecticut’s highest court last year rejected Deutsche Bank’s efforts to hold Vik personally liable and pierce the corporate veil of Turks and Caicos-based Sebastian. And two years ago, a lower Connecticut court junked Deutsche’s lawsuit against Vik and his wife for allegedly attempting to tank the value of Confirmit stock, apparently just to fuck with the Germans.
Alas, Vik’s New England winning streak is at an end, although we suspect his new vocation of doing whatever it takes to not pay Deutsche Bank will continue.
The court’s unanimous opinion overturned a ruling by the Connecticut Appellate Court, which had ordered a state-level case dismissed on the grounds that the litigation privilege gave Alexander Vik and Caroline Vik immunity from allegations of interference with a court-ordered sale of shares in the Norwegian software company Confirmit in 2019…. “The present case involves whether the defendants were involved in a conspiracy between 2016 and 2020 to halt or delay the sale of a Norwegian software company in order to prevent the plaintiff from partially satisfying the English judgment,” the opinion says. “Because the defendants have failed to identify any material factual overlap between the two cases, we decline to consider the matter further and turn to the merits of the plaintiff’s appeal.”
Deutsche Bank Wins Conn. Appeal In Battle With Billionaire [Law360]
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