Do you think this might had something to do with the Darts selling neog?
Dart Family Buries the Hatchet
With Judge and Each Other
An INTERACTIVE JOURNAL News Roundup
The heirs of the Dart Container Corp. drinking-cup fortune settled their
legal dispute Friday, ending a six-year feud involving billions of dollars,
multiple trust funds and allegations of deceit and even judicial bias.
The feuding parties went before Ingham County, Michigan, Probate Judge
Donald Owens Friday morning with the proposed settlement, which the
judge accepted and promptly sealed.
"It's been a long six-and-a-half-plus years," William Dart told the judge
this morning. "It just seemed it was right to bring an end to this."
The struggle began in 1992, when Thomas Dart
sued his father, William, and two brothers,
Kenneth and Robert. He accused them of cheating
him out of a $350 million trust that his grandfather,
Dart Container founder W.F. Dart, set up for him
before he died in 1976.
Even the judge in the case was drawn into the
bitter dispute. Thomas Dart accused Judge Owens
of bribery and bias, citing an improvement in the
judge's lifestyle. The state attorney general's office
eventually cleared Judge Owens, who said he had
more money to spend because three of his four
children finished college, his alimony payments ended, and his wife
inherited $270,000.
The Darts are one of Michigan's wealthiest families. W.F. Dart perfected a
process for making high-quality polystyrene cups in the late 1950s.
Closely held Dart Container, once based in Mason, Mich., but now in
Sarasota, Fla., is the world's leading maker of foam cups and food
containers.
Over the last five years the Darts have been a repeated thorn in the side of
Brazil, stemming from their holding of some $1.4 billion of the nation's
devalued debt.
In 1994 the family refused to participate in a restructuring of Brazil's debt
that had been negotiated largely by a group of commercial banks. The
restructuring went through anyway, and the Darts filed suit in an attempt to
force Brazil to pay off their share much earlier than it had planned. The suit
was dismissed by a federal judge.
Two years later the Darts' issuance of Eurobonds secured with Brazilian
debt took some of the gloss off the country's own $750 million offering in
the global bond market.
Latin America holds a separate connection for Kenneth Dart. In 1994 he
renounced his U.S. citizenship in favor of Belize, known for its status as a
scuba-diving mecca -- and as a tax haven.
The family was the second-largest shareholder of Salomon Inc. until 1995,
when it cut its stake to 0.04% from about 7.2%. Following a series of
acquisitions and mergers, Salomon is now part of Citigroup Inc.
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