Tag: corporate litigation

Lumber Exec’s Diversion of Profits to Company Owned by Son Supports Minority Shareholders’ Breach of Fiduciary Duty and Shareholder Oppression Claims – IL 2nd Dist.

Roberts v. Zimmerman, et al., 2021 IL App (2d) 191088-U provides a useful primer on the pleadings and evidence required to sustain a breach of fiduciary duty and shareholder oppression claim against a corporate officer and the contours of the business judgment rule defense to those claims.

The case involved three separate but related lumber buying companies:  Outstanding, Our Wood Loft, Inc. (“OWL”), and Lake City Hardwood (“Lake City”).  OWL is owned 1/3 by the two plaintiffs and 2/3 by the defendant majority shareholder.  Lake City is owned by the majority shareholder’s son.

Plaintiffs’ salient claim was that OWL’s majority shareholder breached his fiduciary duties to the company and minority shareholders by buying lumber from Lake City at a higher price than he could have paid other vendors.  According to the plaintiffs, the net result of the majority shareholder’s actions was a depletion in OWL profits over a multi-year span.  The fact that the director was paying the increased lumber prices to his son’s company created additional bad optics and provided more ammunition for the plaintiffs’ lawsuit.

Plaintiffs’ alleged breach of fiduciary duty and shareholder oppression under Sections 12.56(a)(3)(oppressive conduct) and 12.56(a)(4)(misapplication of corporate funds and/or waste) of the BCA.  Plaintiffs also joined an aiding-and – abetting claims against the majority shareholder’s son and wife.  Plaintiffs alleged these latter defendants were complicit in the majority shareholder’s scheme to enrich his son’s Lake City business to the detriment of OWL.

The trial court dismissed all claims except for the breach of duty claim premised on diversion of profits. After a bench trial, the trial court found in favor of the majority shareholder on this surviving claim on the basis that Plaintiffs failed to prove compensable damages.  Plaintiffs appealed.

Reversing, the appeals court first examined Illinois breach of fiduciary principles in the context of a close corporation shareholder dispute.

Breach of Fiduciary Duty

Corporate officers owe a fiduciary duty of loyalty to the corporation and are precluded from actively exploiting their positions within the corporation for their own personal benefit or impeding the corporation’s ability to conduct the business for which it was formed.

Here, the Court found the majority shareholder owed a fiduciary duty of loyalty to act in OWL’s best interest, to deal on behalf of OWL fairly and honestly, and seek to maximize OWL’s profits.  This duty included ensuring that OWL got the best price for lumber it bought from third parties.

The Court held that the majority shareholder breached his fiduciary duty by paying inflated lumber prices to his son’s company – Lake City.

The Court rejected Defendant’s business judgment rule (BJR) defense.  Under the BJR, courts will not interfere with business decisions of a corporate officer even if it seems that a more prudent decision could have been made.  However, a corporate officer cannot use the rule as a shield for conduct that does not rise to the level of due care.

Here, the court gave the BJR a cramped construction: it found that the rule only applies to honest mistakes in judgment and activities over which a corporate officer has discretion – such as whether an officer spent too much or too little on advertising, salaries, and the like.  The Rule does not apply to situations where challenged conduct subverts the rights of a corporation.  A corporate officer does not have discretion to divert profits from a corporation.

According to the Court, with minimal investigation, the majority shareholder would have discovered that Lake City was profiting at the expense of OWL by selling lumber at inflated prices to OWL.  [¶ 71]

Shareholder Oppression and Aiding-and-Abetting Claims

Reversing the Section 2-615 dismissal of the Plaintiffs’ shareholder oppression and aiding-and-abetting claims, the Court noted that shareholder oppression is not limited to acts that are illegal, fraudulent, or that involve mismanaged funds.  Instead, shareholder oppression applies to a wide gamut of conduct including a course of heavy-handed and exclusionary conduct and self-dealing.

To state a colorable aiding-and-abetting claim in Illinois, a plaintiff must allege (1) the party whom the defendant aids performed a wrongful act that caused an injury, (2) the defendant is generally aware in his or her role as part of the overall or tortious activity at the time or she provides assistance; and (3) defendant must knowingly and substantially assist the principal violation.

Here, Plaintiffs sufficiently alleged enough facts to sustain both claims. The allegations that the majority shareholder overpaid for lumber at OWL’s expense and to his son’s/Lake City’s benefit sufficiently pled an actionable oppression claim.

The Court similarly held that the Plaintiffs adequately pled Lake City’s active participation in the underlying lumber purchasing scheme in the aiding-and-abetting Complaint count.

Afterwords:

Roberts cements the proposition that a majority shareholder’s diversion of corporate profits to another entity can support both a breach of fiduciary duty claim and a statutory shareholder oppression action.

The case also makes clear that shareholder oppression is not limited to acts that are illegal, fraudulent, or that involve mismanaged funds.  Here, Plaintiffs allegation that the majority shareholder used an unnecessary middleman – Lake City – to which the company overpaid for lumber and lost resultant profits – was enough to make out a colorable oppression claim.

Finally, Roberts clarifies that a successful aiding-and-abetting a breach of fiduciary duty claim requires allegations of a defendant’s active participation and knowledge in/of  underlying wrongful conduct.  Constructive knowledge is not enough.

 

 

 

Debtor’s Use of LLC As ‘Personal Piggy Bank’ Leads to Turnover and Charging Orders

Golfwood Square, LLC v. O’Malley, 2018 IL App(1st) 172220-U, examines the interplay between a charging order and a third party citation to discover assets turnover order against an LLC member debtor.  The plaintiff in Golfwood engaged in a years’ long effort to unspool a judgment debtor’s multi-tiered business entity arrangement in the hopes of collecting a sizeable (about $1M) money judgment.

Through post-judgment proceedings, the plaintiff learned that the debtor owned a 90% interest in an LLC (Subsidiary or Sub-LLC) that was itself the sole member of another LLC (Parent LLC) that received about $225K from the sale of a Chicago condominium.

Plaintiff also discovered the defendant had unfettered access to Parent LLC’s bank account and had siphoned over $80K from it since the judgment date.

In 2013 and 2017, plaintiff respectively obtained a charging order against Sub-LLC and a turnover order against Parent LLC in which the plaintiff sought to attach the remaining condominium sale proceeds.  The issue confronting the court was whether a judgment creditor could get a turnover order against a parent company to enforce a prior charging order against a subsidiary entity.  In deciding for the creditor, the Court examined the content and purpose of citations to discover assets turnover orders and LLC charging orders.

Code Section 2-1402 empowers a judgment creditor can issue supplementary proceedings to discover whether a debtor is in possession of assets or whether a third party is holding assets of a debtor that can be applied to satisfy a judgment.

Section 30-20 of the Limited Liability Company Act allows that same judgment creditor to apply for a charging order against an LLC member’s distributional interest in a limited liability company. Once a charging order issues from the court, it becomes a lien (or “hold”) on the debtor’s distributional interest and requires the LLC to pay over to the charging order recipient all distributions that would otherwise be paid to the judgment debtor. 735 ILCS 5/2-1402; 805 ILCS 180/30-20. Importantly, a charging order applicant does not have to name the LLC(s) as a party defendant(s) since the holder of the charging order doesn’t gain membership or management rights  in the LLC. [⁋⁋ 22, 35]

Under Parent LLC’s operating agreement, once the condominium was sold, Parent LLC was to dissolve and distribute all assets directly to Sub-LLC – Parent’s lone member.  From there, any distributions from Sub-LLC should have gone to defendant (who held a 90% ownership interest in Sub-LLC) and then turned over to the plaintiff.

However, defendant circumvented the charging order by accessing the sale proceeds (held in Parent LLC’s account) and distributing them to himself. The Court noted that documents produced during post-judgment discovery showed that the defendant spent nearly $80,000 of the sale proceeds on his personal debts and to pay off his other business obligations.

Based on the debtor’s conduct in accessing and dissipating Parent LLC’s bank account with impunity, and preventing Parent LLC from distributing the assets to Sub-LLC, where they could be reached by plaintiff, the trial court ordered the debtor to turn all Parent LLC’s remaining account funds over to the plaintiff to enforce the earlier charging order against Sub-LLC.

The court rejected the defendant’s argument that Parent LLC was in serious debt and that the condo sale proceeds were needed to pay off its debts. The Court found this argument clashed with defendant’s deposition testimony where he stated under oath that Parent LLC “had no direct liabilities.” This judicial admission – a clear, unequivocal statement concerning a fact within a litigant’s knowledge – was binding on the defendant and prevented him from trying to contradict this testimony. The argument also fell short in light of defendant’s repeatedly raiding Parent LLC’s account to pay his personal debts and those of his other business ventures all to the exclusion of plaintiff.

The court then summarily dispensed with defendant’s claim that the plaintiff improperly pierced the corporate veils of Parent LLC and Sub-LLC in post-judgment proceedings. In Illinois, a judgment creditor typically cannot pierce a corporate veil in supplementary proceedings. Instead, it must file a new action in which it seeks piercing as a remedy for an underlying cause of action.

The Court found that the trial court’s turnover order did not hold defendant personally liable for either LLC’s debt. Instead, the turnover order required Parent LLC to turnover assets belonging to the judgment debtor – the remaining condominium sale proceeds – to the plaintiff creditor.

Afterwords:

This case presents in sharp relief the difficulty of collecting a judgment from a debtor who operates under a protective shield of several layers of corporate entities.

Where a debtor uses an LLC’s assets as his “personal piggy bank,” Golfwood and cases like it show that a court won’t hesitate to vindicate a creditor’s recovery right through use of a turnover and charging order.

The case is also noteworthy as it illustrates a court looking to an LLC operating agreement for textual support for its turnover order.