Joshua Alper is partner at the Morgan & Morgan Business Trial Group in Miami. Courtesy Photo

Business partners of a South Florida broker for last year’s $56 million sale of Pompano Beach’s Festival Marketplace mall have accused him of swindling them out of payment for their work on the deal.

Christopher Bauso and Claudia Herrera claim that real estate agent Morris Jaime Godur hid from them that the property had been sold so he wouldn’t have to share the $2.24 million sale commission, according to Bauso and Herrera’s Broward Circuit Court complaint. Godur had promised to pay Bauso 20% of the sale commission because Bauso connected Godur to the job opportunity by introducing him to an executive with the selling company. Separately, Herrera and Godur had a contract to evenly split sale commissions for deals for three years starting July 2015.

“The purpose of this lawsuit is to hold Mr. Godur and his companies accountable for their misconduct in denying my clients the commission that they are rightfully owed,” said Joshua Alper, the attorney who filed the suit July 25.

Alper is partner at Morgan & Morgan in Miami.

Godur’s attorney, Kevin Mason at KPM Law Firm in Boca Raton, declined to comment.

IMC Equity Group, a North Miami-based commercial real estate and private equity company, bought the 382,000-square-foot Festival Marketplace indoor flea market in April 2018 from investment firm R/S Associates of Florida. IMC paid $25 million for the actual building and parking lot that are on 27 acres at 2900 W. Sample Road, and it paid $31 million for the businesses at the flea market.

The suit says Bauso in May 2016 introduced Godur to Doug Meyer, a chief financial officer for the seller, because Meyer was looking for a broker to help sell the marketplace. A month later, Godur introduced Herrera to Meyer.

Both Godur and Herrera worked on marketing the property as well as on helping out on a redevelopment plan by finding an architect and a construction company. Their agreement said they evenly split all sale commissions regardless of who did how much work on a deal, according to the complaint.

Herrera also was OK with the 20% payment to Bauso.

The agreement between Godur and Bauso was only verbal, but the complaint says this is a standard industry practice.

Godur separately bad-mouthed Bauso and Herrera in front of the other as a way to get them to stop talking with each other, helping Godur better hide the deal closing, according to the complaint. Among the misrepresentations he made was that they owe him money. He also represented Herrera in a bad light in front of Meyer, the seller’s CFO, to sever communications between them.

“In fact, Ms. Herrera didn’t know that Mr. Godur had presented an offer to the buyer because at this point he had shut her out,” Alper said.

Godur and Herrera were at one point affiliated with Boca Raton-based real estate agency B Realtors Inc., which had a nonexclusive brokerage agreement with the Festival mall.

Gary Youngman, B Realtors president, declined to comment.

The suit doesn’t specify exactly how much Bauso and Herrera are owed from the sale commission of $2.24 million.

If Bauso received 20% and Herrera and Godur split the rest, Bauso would get $448,000, and Herrera and Godur each would get about $900,000.

Herrera and Bauso are seeking damages and a jury trial. They name two companies registered to Godur as defendants as well. They are the deactivated JV Acquisitions LLC and the still active JVA Global LLC.

The suit lists breach of agreement, breach of contract, breach of implied-in-fact contract, conversion, unjust enrichment and promissory estoppel counts.

The Festival Marketplace has 250 stores businesses ranging from discount stores for shoes, jewelry and fragrances to service providers altering clothes and fixing watches, according to its website.

In the booming South Florida real estate market, properties big and small trade daily. This has created a lot of jobs in the real estate field but also made the region fertile ground for sale commission disputes.

“Obviously in South Florida, real estate deals are hot,” said Alper, the attorney for Herrera and Bauso, “and these types of disputes happen with a fair amount of regularity.”