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Lawsuits against NC political donor show pattern of delay, lack of cooperation

Judge says Durham businessman Greg Lindberg "engaged in a pattern of intentional discovery misconduct."

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The case file in Dunhill v. Tisha Lindberg
By
Travis Fain
, WRAL statehouse reporter
RALEIGH, N.C. — In June 2019, Greg Lindberg found himself in a deposition.
The federal government had indicted the Durham insurance magnate, North Carolina's largest political donor, three months earlier on bribery charges. But this was unrelated.

Lindberg was there to answer questions in a long-running lawsuit against his soon-to-be ex-wife, whom he'd accused of embezzling from Dunhill Holdings, one of his many companies. He arrived nearly an hour and a half late – to both days of the deposition – and refused to answer questions so often that the judge would later go through the transcript and count up the times he said "I can't comment on that."

It was more than 100.

Lindberg paused, more than 10 seconds at a time, before answering simple questions. He refused to read documents, using his time instead to talk about "the number of text characters appearing on each line of each page," Superior Court Judge Orlando Hudson wrote a month and a half later, in a court order accusing Lindberg of improper deposition responses "too numerous to pinpoint cite."

Lindberg suggested that his wife's attorney had forged documents Lindberg's own legal team handed over in the case. He, along with his attorney, attempted to avoid questioning about emails Lindberg sent himself, writing "attorney client privilege" at the top without actually sending them to an attorney, the judge wrote.

"They are literally emails typed and sent to himself with no individuals copied," Hudson wrote.

"At one point during his testimony," Hudson wrote in his July 30 order, "Mr. Lindberg evaded questioning through a bizarre ramble about the Biblical interpretation of the word 'to know,' all of which was prompted by a simple question of whether he 'knows' certain people who communicated with by email [sic]."

Greg Lindberg

Lindberg was so uncooperative, both during the depositions and in the months before, as documents came in late, not at all or in such volume they could hardly be deciphered, that Hudson simply decided the lawsuit for Lindberg's wife before trial. He threw out the accusations against her, saying no evidence had been offered. He found in her favor on all claims and left for trial only how much Tisha Lindberg should get in damages from her husband, whom Hudson described as a "self-proclaimed billionaire."

"The court finds that Mr. Lindberg engaged in a pattern of intentional discovery misconduct," Hudson wrote in his order.

Greg Lindberg has appealed that order, but the pattern Hudson described crops up in other cases involving the wealthy investor, who is no stranger to the courthouse. His legal fights with his ex-wife, both through their divorce case and other legal actions coinciding with their marriage's demise, are so voluminous that one clerk at the Durham County Courthouse called them "job security."

But in business cases, too, attorneys facing off against the Lindberg legal team complain of delay tactics that are, in one attorney's words, "beyond anything I've ever seen."

"This is beyond, in talking to other attorneys, anything anyone has ever seen," the attorney said.

That lawyer and another from a separate case against Lindberg's businesses requested anonymity for this article. One described Lindberg as "a little vindictive."

But case files themselves speak to the issue. The introduction to one recent filing in a North Carolina Business Court case begins with: "Will this ever end?" It goes on to accuse Lindberg of delaying depositions and accuses his team of claiming things that are "at best, grossly misleading."

That case was filed in early 2018 by a man in India who says Lindberg hired him to grow operations there. Ajay Gupta says he did just that, then was terminated unexpectedly in late 2017 and never paid the millions of dollars he was promised in bonuses.

Lindberg's legal team has denied this, and one of his attorneys told WRAL News this week that various allegations of slow and jumbled discovery in this case and others are unfounded.

WRAL News sent summaries of those allegations and a list of cases involved to Lindberg through his spokesman, as well as to Global Growth, which is a party to many of the lawsuits under its old name, Eli Global. Lindberg remained the company's sole shareholder after the name change, which came about six months after his indictment.

WRAL News also sent that list to the pair of attorneys whose names appear most often on the cases involved: Aaron Tobin of Dallas and and Matthew Nis Leerberg of Raleigh.

A spokesman responded with only a short statement from Tobin: "The Court’s July 30, 2019, order in the Dunhill case is on appeal. The allegations in the other motions are unfounded. As counsel, we will work zealously to protect our clients’ interests.”

Three days after this story posted Lindberg's spokesman reached out with additional comment addressing several of the cases cited. That statement is appended to end of this article.

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In another N.C. Business Court Case, Ehmann v. Medflow, Lindberg's company is accused of terminating employees after Eli Global acquired Medflow and not paying the severance called for in their contracts. Attorneys in that case asked the judge this summer to force Lindberg's team to turn over evidence.

"The truth is that defendants do not want to turn over these documents because they will support Plaintiffs’ claims," attorneys in the case wrote. "Defendants have done their best for four years to avoid production."

In a July response, Lindberg's attorneys argued that most of the documents the plaintiffs sought aren't relevant at this phase of the case. Among other things, the company is accused of not producing documents that plaintiffs know exist.

Lindberg has also been involved in a federal case out of New York, where a company he owns called CapLOC tried to recover $34 million from entities CapLOC accused of fraud. An attorney for the defendants wrote in a court filing last year that CapLOC and its parent, Eli Global, left "glaring subject gaps" and "substantial time gaps" in the internal emails it produced during discovery.

Among other things, the companies produced only nine emails to or from Lindberg, "who appears to have run CapLOC/Eli Global with an iron hand," attorney Daniel Markham wrote in the filing. Altogether, the company produced "only 25 internal email exchanges and 17 other internal emails for the period of December 2016 to August 2017," Markham wrote.

"Defendants have been hobbled in taking their discovery by CapLOC/Eli Global’s purposeful refusal to produce material documents crucial to a fair trial," he wrote.

An attorney in another business case said his deposition with Lindberg was "incredibly unusual."

"What's funny about it is how little he answered," the attorney said. "He doesn't know the basics about anything in his business."

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Lindberg seems to be cooperating with the U.S. Attorney's Office as the criminal prosecution against him moves toward a February trial.
The federal judge in that case said in a recent scheduling order that he was "confident that both sides are proceeding in good faith and as expeditiously as possible." Lindberg's attorneys will be in Charlotte court room Tuesday to argue for the case's dismissal.

Lindberg is involved in more lawsuits than can easily be cataloged, and attorneys in some of them said they didn't recall problems with discovery or depositions.

George Galland, a Chicago attorney, sued Eli Global on behalf of a man who believes he's owed a bonus for helping close a merger before he was fired. Galland said he gets along with opposing counsel.

"They have done everything they can to slow the case down, but that's par for the course," Galland said.

The cases involving Lindberg's ex-wife, Tisha, though, are acrimonious at nearly every turn. Two former security employees filed a lawsuit last year against the Lindberg company that employed them, alleging they were fired because they wouldn't lie on Greg Lindberg's behalf in a custody case.

Greg Lindberg said in a deposition in that case that one of those security employees, Dennis Francis, swore to him Tisha Lindberg spent the night alone in a hotel room with another male employee. Francis denied this when called to the witness stand, according to court documents.

Francis said in court filings last year that, when he denied the story, Greg Lindberg got "visibly angry and start typing on his iPad in the courtroom."

When Francis got to the parking deck outside, he got a text from his supervisor who told him he'd been fired, the lawsuit states. Robert Richardson, who worked with Francis, got a call a few minutes later with the same message, the lawsuit states. He believes the firing was an attempt to dissuade him from testifying later in the Lindbergs' divorce proceedings, the suit states.

In his own court filings, Greg Lindberg denies that he fired the plaintiffs because they testified truthfully or, in Richardson's case, because he was expected to do so.

Carlos Mahoney represents Francis and Richardson, who are both former law enforcement officers. He filed an affidavit in early October, accusing Lindberg of repeated evasive behavior. He said Lindberg's attorneys turned over electronic documents where every page was an image file without any references to what documents went with which question.

He said Lindberg was "often non-responsive and evasive" during a deposition, refusing among other things to authenticate a printout from his own website, greglindberg.com. When Mahoney asked whether Tisha Lindberg was the chief executive of the family security company and whether the security team reported to her, Greg Lindberg responded, over and over again, by accusing her of sleeping with them.

At one point, Mahoney said in his affidavit, Lindberg tore an exhibit.

"I'm sorry. Please don't mess around with our exhibits here," Mahoney said, according to a deposition transcript Mahoney quotes in his affidavit.

"Why not?" Lindberg responded.

"Because they're official documents, Mr. Lindberg," Mahoney responded. "In the future, please don't tear off any of the exhibits."

Update Nov. 15, 2019: Three days after this article posted, a spokesman for Greg Lindberg reached out with the following statement:
"Any accusation that Greg Lindberg has failed to comply with any court order to turn over documents is not accurate – as are any complaints that Mr. Lindberg has provided misleading information. The allegations likely come from disgruntled opponents.
"The Dunhill order referenced is on appeal and Mr. Lindberg is confident that the appeal will be successful. In the Ehmann case, the presiding judge severed the case four years ago. The plaintiff’s discovery efforts were off base in that they related to issues that were not part of the severed issue.  Therefore, the court has not ruled on them. So, while the plaintiff complains that Mr. Lindberg has not turned over any evidence it isn’t because Mr. Lindberg is being evasive – it’s because the judge hasn’t yet ruled on the requests.
"The same issue is affecting the Gupta case. While certain participants are complaining, to the media and otherwise, that Mr. Lindberg is needlessly delaying depositions, the truth is that Mr. Gupta’s legal team has filed several discovery motions – but have yet to have anything granted.
"The CapLOC case is even more clear cut. CapLOC has filed a number of motions to compel their opposition to turn over documents – and the judge has ruled in its favor. Defendants’ legal team has similarly filed several motions but had the judge deny all but one of its requests – and even then, they didn’t get everything they wanted.
"We can go on and on. While Mr. Lindberg’s court opponents have taken to making ad hominin attacks, both in legal papers and in whispers to the media, Mr. Lindberg will continue to fight his battles in court."

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