G?mez vs. Bommarito: A Summary
When I accepted DR1's kind request to be the guest at their Sunday chat on Dominican law, I never imagined that I would end up discussing personal matters on this message board. However, the accusations and half-truths posted above have called into question my reputation and that of my firm and therefore leave me no choice but to set the record straight. Our firm?s record for more than seventy-three years of practice has been good enough to make us one of the most respectable law firms in the country. We will not tolerate a blemish on that record. Bear with me as I try to summarize the facts of the case.
Background
Karina?s client is Luigi G?mez (?G?mez Jr.?), son of Luis Jos? G?mez (?G?mez Sr.?). G?mez Sr. and John Bommarito are the main shareholders of Desarrollo Terramar , S.A. (?Terramar?), a Dominican company formed in 1986 which owns a large subdivision in Sos?a. Bommarito controls at this time more than 50% of the equity of Terramar, G?mez Sr., approximately 40%. I used to control a small equity position in the company (about 10%) but I sold my shares three years ago. For more than ten years I acted as the buffer between my two good friends, G?mez Sr. and Bommarito, whenever differences arose regarding the management of the project. In 1997, litigation started in earnest between them and I stepped aside: I refused to take either party as a client in the litigation, I sold my shares in the company and I resigned as the corporate secretary. The litigation encompasses countless civil, criminal and land court complaints, of each party against the other. Bommarito, for example, has filed a criminal complaint against the G?mez for holding an illegal assembly of the company; the G?mez have fired back with criminal complaints even against Bommarito?s daughter, who substituted me for a time as corporate secretary, for not delivering minutes of a company meeting on time. Until mid-1999, lawyers for both parties used me as a conduit for proposals and counter proposals for a negotiated settlement. I believe Karina de la Oz even visited my home in Santiago with other lawyers for both parties.
G?mez Jr. came into the picture around 1996 when his father brought him into the project as a day-to-day manager. As mentioned in my former post, he was very close to my nephew, Julio Brea Guzm?n, who works with me from our Sos?a office. In fact, we represented G?mez Jr. for free in several legal matters, including a suit or negotiation against a former employer, for which he gave us a very grateful plaque thanking us for our assistance. G?mez Jr., of course, was not originally a shareholder in Terramar. He never had a steady job and was always looking for ways to get ahead in his life. His father, however, gave him some token shares ( five or ten) in the company as an incentive. When the fighting between G?mez Sr. and Bommarito began in 1997, it was G?mez Jr. who showed up, for tactical reasons, as the plaintiff in the Land Court litigation and placed a lien on the Terramar property. G?mez Sr. is a person with assets and would have to think twice before filing frivolous suits for fear of a successful countersuit, specially in a case in which the bylaws of Terramar expressly state that a shareholder cannot place a lien on company property for differences arising with other shareholders. G?mez Jr., being a person of little wealth, has no such restraint.
?The Case?
In the summer of 1999, a German client of ours and long-term resident in the D.R. came to our office asking for assistance in the purchase of a lot in Terramar. She was looked after by one our associates, Milagros de la Cruz, who knowing of the situation in the subdivision contacted Bommarito and asked him about the G?mez Jr. lien. Bommarito told her that his lawyers had informed him that the lien was in the process of being lifted. In effect, a week or two later Milagros was handed a lien release, a title search was done and certification obtained from the Registrar of Titles in Puerto Plata attesting to the fact that there was no lien on the property, and the sale closed. Since Milagros is not a notary, my nephew, Julio Brea Guzm?n, authenticated the signatures of Bommarito and the buyer in the deed of sale. And that was that: a simple transaction for which we collected the grand sum of $500 in total fees and our client obtained a clean title on a small lot in Terramar.
Sometime later, however, we learned that G?mez Jr. had filed a criminal complaint against his own lead attorney for lifting the lien without his permission or for ?forging? the signature of another lawyer, a cousin of the first, who was the attorney of record in the case. Why would G?mez Jr. own attorney do such a thing? We can only speculate. However, it is a known fact that in early 1999, Bommarito and the G?mez came very close to a general settlement of their differences. After a meeting with G?mez Sr. and Bommarito in my office in December 1998, I drafted an initial settlement agreement based on the division between them of the Terramar properties. This proposal was discussed and amended over several months by their respective lawyers and a definite settlement seemed imminent. Negotiations failed at the last minute, however, because, in the opinion of the G?mez ex-lead attorney, new lawyers brought into the case (including Karina) wanted to restart everything from scratch. The lead attorney, who had been working the case on a contingence basis for three years without receiving a penny, apparently told his clients that he would stop work on the case and lifted the lien.
Feeling frustrated and betrayed by the turn of events in the unpredictable game of litigation, G?mez Jr. decided to go after the umpire, yours truly. In the complaint filed against his ex-lead attorney, he accused me, without a shred of evidence, of masterminding the whole scheme in order to close on the purchase by my German client. Bommarito was also included in the complaint as an accessory. The notary, Julio Brea, G?mez Jr.?s ex-best friend, was also brought into the situation for committing the high crime of authenticating the signatures of Bommarito and the German buyer who signed the deed of sale in his presence. It is to be expected that the complaints against us will be thrown out soon by the investigating judge (?Juez de Instrucci?n?). Who in his right mind would conceive the notion that our firm, for a $500 fee, would become an accessory to forgery or whatever? Had our goal been to make money, we could have accepted the representation of Bommarito against the G?mez and earned extremely high fees instead of staying out of the fray and trying to have them come to an agreement. In the meantime, we have sued G?mez Jr. back for significant damages for filing a frivolous complaint, as have Bommarito and his daughter for a former complaint that has already been thrown out of court. Karina?s postings on this board will come in handy to buttress these suits.
For the unitiated in the peculiarities of Dominican criminal law, it should be pointed out that under the current system, anybody can be dragged into the chambers of an investigating judge for the most meritless of complaints. The accuser will therefore have a window of opportunity, while the judge with his usual backlog of cases gets to the point of rejecting the complaint, to shout from the rooftops: ?There is a CRIMINAL COMPLAINT against Mr. Guzman and Mr. Bommarito at the Santiago Criminal Court.? In fact, there is no criminal court in charge of the case. A judge is investigating whether to send it to court or not. Of course, meanwhile, the damage to the reputation of the ?accused? has been done. (By the way, Karina, you should know better than to tell people to check the documents for themselves: the investigation of the ?Juez de Instrucci?n? is secret by law, precisely to prevent the kind of posturing you are doing; nobody can have access to those documents.)
Final Thoughts
Being an umpire is not always an easy job. You usually get it from both sides. I remember a story once about a referee in Peru who was almost killed by both teams in a soccer game and had to be rescued at the last minute by the police. Bommarito has never forgiven me for not taking the case vs. the G?mez. The G?mez never believed that I was not on Bommarito?s side. G?mez Sr., apparently very sick, does not deserve to live his old age from courtroom to courtroom. Bommarito, one of the hardest-working person I have ever met, should concentrate not in destroying his adversaries but in further enlarging his business empire in the Sos?a area. (Besides a Remax realtor, Bommarito who has been living in the D.R. since 1984, is a developer, a builder, and owns car rental agencies, a tennis club, restaurants, etc.) When and if Bommarito and the G?mez decide that they have had enough, I?ll be there for both of them. But, please, don?t shoot the piano player.
