Update (January 26, 2016): One more revolution in the slow wheel of justice…. (Attorney Timothy Oliver is suspended from the practice of law pending the petition for his disbarment.)
Update (September 15, 2014): Reporter Jim Hammerand, Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal (subcription required) reported attorney Timothy J. Oliver’s guilty plea to felony wire fraud this past week.
Update (December 16, 2011): The earlier post concerned multiple layered financial transactions and queried whether the structure, in the end, was legitimate or fraud. U.S. District Court Judge Donovan W. Frank weighed in this week, finding fraud against some defendants, not against others.
Original Post (November 16, 2011) (original headline: Turtles All The Way Down): The way many businesses are organized, with entities owning parts of entities holding parts of entities, can remind one of “Russian Nesting Dolls” or even the cosmological conundrum expressed in by shorthand expression “turtles all the way down.”
Such complex interrelationships are not necessarily devised to mask fraud. In fact, there are most often legitimate business reasons for complicated commercial arrangements — delicate multi-player balancing acts of risk-sharing and profit-sharing. Then, again, sometimes “shell games” are devised to mask fraud.
And sometimes it’s very difficult to tell what one is dealing with – a legitimate business transaction or a shell game.
When complex multi-actor commercial transactions go South, as so many have in recent years, lenders can find themselves in a multi-layered fictional Middle Earth world in which the layers of entities, fractionalized interests, and shell companies can leave a lender, at the end of the day, at a loss as to whether they can ever recover on a loan default in spite of having taken all kinds of precautions to be sure the loan was secure against default.
Such is the case for Meecorp Capital whose 2009 complaint culminated in a recent bench trial before U.S. District Court Judge Donovan W. Frank (D. Minn.) against attorney Timothy J. Oliver and many others.
To hear Meecorp tell it, the trial revealed blatant fraud.
Unsurprisingly, the pro se post-trial brief of Defendant Timothy J. Oliver reads quite differently.