NEW YORK -The Uzan family, which controls Telsim, Turkey’s second-largest mobile carrier, will most likely be found guilty of fraud for borrowing and never repaying $2.7 billion in equipment vendor loans from Motorola Inc. and Nokia Corp., federal Judge Jed Rakoff said Feb. 19.
“The court’s familiarity with the history makes it an open-and-shut case with respect to the bulk of the damages sought, if not the entirety of the damages,” said Rakoff, who presides at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Motorola and Nokia filed suit early last year, alleging the Uzans violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act for borrowing the money without ever intending to repay it. Their claim seeks the maximum triple damages authorized under RICO.
Referring to the Uzans, who did not appear for the first and only day of the trial, Judge Rakoff offered these closing remarks: “The bottom-line conclusions are so overwhelmingly supported by the evidence that it’s hard to escape the inference that the single biggest reason the defendants are not here is they knew from Day One they had committed a huge fraud, which has been exposed and identified, and their best defense is obfuscation, allegations of bias, perversion through collusion of the processes in courts here and elsewhere, everything but addressing the matter on its merits.”
Judge Rakoff reserved formal decision but said he expected to issue a final, written ruling in the near future, possibly before the end of this month.
