Vice Chancellor Joseph Slights.

The Delaware Court of Chancery on Tuesday extinguished a decadelong civil conspiracy suit stemming from a failed partnership to commercialize Russian satellites, saying that extensive discovery had exposed the plaintiff's central theory as a sham.

In a 44-page memorandum opinion, Vice Chancellor Joseph R. Slights III granted summary judgment to Finmeccanica SpA, nearly 11 years after plaintiff Dennis A. Reid had accused the Italian satellite-maker of forming a Delaware limited liability company in order to hijack the venture with U.S. Russian Telecommunications.

Finmeccanica denied any participation in a conspiracy and argued that the case should be dismissed because it lacked any connection to the First State. However, former Vice Chancellor John W. Noble allowed the case to proceed in 2008, sending the case careening down what Slights called a “rabbit hole to a conspiracy wonderland where the court and the parties have resided ever since.”

In a strongly worded ruling, Slights said that eight years of jurisdictional and merit discovery not only failed to produce any evidence in support of Reid's claims, but it actually showed that Reid himself had orchestrated the takeover and later tried to cover his own tracks.

“Plaintiff devised a fantasy Delaware-based conspiracy among the defendants and pled those facts in his verified complaint as a basis to argue that this court could exercise personal jurisdiction over the nonresident defendants,” Slights wrote.

“It is now time to return to reality.”

Reid's case hinged on his “conspiracy theory” of personal jurisdiction, which extends a Delaware court's reach to nonresidents who take specific acts in the state to further a plot to defraud.

Reid had argued from the outset that Finmeccanica lied to the members of USRT, saying the Italian government would not contribute much-needed funding to the project unless its was controlled by Italian citizens. Finmeccanica, Reid alleged in his complaint, then formed USRT Holdings in Delaware to facilitate a coup of USRT and then deny compensation to its former members.

According to court papers, Reid had convinced Noble that the evidence would bear out his claim. But Slights, who joined the Chancery Court in 2016, said evidence from discovery showed that Reid had floated the lie about the need for Italian involvement and then coached USRT's officers on how to convince the company's members to surrender all of their equity stake, using USRT Holdings as the buyer.

Later, Reid and his cohorts severed all communications with the former members and tried to destroy the evidence of his plan, according to Slights' opinion.

“With the light of overwhelming evidence bearing down on his jurisdictional position, it is now clear that Reid misled the court by crying 'victim' of a Delaware-based conspiracy, when, in fact, he was an architect of the very wrongdoing that he claimed provided a basis for the court to exercise long-arm jurisdiction over Finmeccanica,” Slights said.

“No reasonable fact finder would conclude otherwise.”

An attorney for Reid declined to comment, and counsel for Finmeccanica did not return calls seeking comment on the ruling.

The case was captioned Reid v. Siniscalchi.