Liberal billionaire George Soros lost out on two legal bids on Tuesday, which may cost him millions.
One of the cases came out of a Manhattan civil court where Soros, along with Indian corporate magnate Purnendu Chatterjee, lost a bid to have a $40 million law suit thrown out. A small aviation company based in North Carolina blames Soros and Chatterjee of looting the company.
In their combined complaints, plaintiffs Coreolis and its wholly-owned subsidiary TradeWinds said Soros and Chatterjee entered the aviation financing business in 1994, and put in place a complex, multi-tiered corporate structure designed to conceal Soros' 50 percent ownership in C-S Aviation and ensure that the aircraft management company owned no aircraft and was otherwise judgment proof.
"The entire business structure was designed as an elaborate shell game intended to defraud and perpetrate injustices," the complaint said.
Ultimately, Coreolis claimed that Soros and Chatterjee grossly undercapitalized C-S Aviation for the purpose of defrauding creditors. Coreolis accused the pair of abandoning C-S Aviation to creditors and claimed they "hastily stripped" the company of its officers, directors, employees, contracts and assets, which they then used in a supposedly new company on Soros' property.
Soros also lost an appeal before the European Court of Human Rights relating to his 2002 insider trading fine.
In the French case, Soros was ordered to repay 2.2 million euros ($2.93 million) he’d made from the share purchase and subsequent sale after judges found he’d acted with the knowledge that the bank might be a takeover target. The fine was reduced after a 2007 decision by France’s supreme court to about 940,000 euros.
Soros’s legal woes are far from over. The octogenarian liberal sweetheart faces a $50 million lawsuit stemming from allegations that he choked and threw a lamp at his 28-year-old ex.