cont
Battle For A Name
For the past 20 years, John Dessauer, the man who refers to himself as the
"foremost authority on global investing," has relied on his name to market
investment ideas through the likes of John Dessauer's Investor's World
newsletter. He promotes himself and his business through regular guest
appearances on Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser. Devotees flock to
faraway investment confabs known as John Dessauer's Dream Swiss Seminar
and John Dessauer's Dream Hawaiian Seminar. And the Dessauer name is
attached to the asset-management business he built on Cape Cod, which now
boasts well over a half-billion dollars. The Dessauer Global Equity Fund is a
namesake.
Now the 63-year-old investment seer is battling for control over his name
with former partner Thomas McIntyre, to whom he ceded control of
Dessauer & McIntyre Asset Management last May when he "surrendered,
forfeited and extinguished" his 60% stock ownership in the company. He
simply handed over his shares and walked away. Legal skirmishes, which
now include Phillips Publishing, publisher of Dessauer's newsletter, and
McGinn Investment Management, a $26.5 million investment firm in
Alexandria, Virginia, that Dessauer is now affiliated with, are expected to
continue this month in Barnstable County Superior Court in Massachusetts.
Essentially, both sides claim exclusive rights to the Dessauer name --
Dessauer because it is his, McIntyre because it is the name of the firm he now
owns and helped build. Peter Gelhaar, of Boston's Donnelly Conroy &
Gelhaar, an attorney for Dessauer, declines to comment. McIntyre would not
discuss the case.
Relations between the protege and his mentor appear to have soured as the
firm grew more successful and Dessauer's role grew more distant. Dessauer
made McIntyre a 20% owner of the firm a few years after he hired him in
1989. In 1992, he handed McIntyre an additional 20% of the firm. By 1997,
McIntyre was president and was overseeing day-to-day affairs at the firm,
and Dessauer acknowledged his role by including the McIntyre moniker in the
firm's name.
Dessauer, meanwhile, spent more and more time in Switzerland, faxing
communiques and, according to allegations in court documents, often
second-guessing the partner's decisions. What appears to have brought things
to a boil, however, is a letter written by Dessauer in late January of last year,
informing the 43-year-old McIntyre that Dessauer intended to formalize what
had been a loose compensation agreement, and in so doing reduce McIntyre's
salary.
"It is time that I stopped splitting the money based on my personal sense of
fairness," Dessauer wrote, according to exhibits filed with the court. "It is time
we had an agreement... . Years ago when I gave you the 40% interest in the
moneymanagement business I hoped the day would come when we could
share the profits on that basis. I did not want you to remain an employee
forever. At first the 40% didn't mean much. But now it does. I assume that
you will have no problem with this proposal. Even if your income were to
flatten out for a while it will flatten out at a great level and rise again in the near
future... . I recognize that the time has come for me to take my full share of the
profits."
And now he wants his name back, too.
Sandra Ward |
