Real Estate Developer Sues Former Brother-in-Law, Demanding $100 Million for Breach of Contract
A family dispute involving the Sapir Organization, a Manhattan-based real estate development firm, reached a new height July 17 when president and CEO Alex Sapir sued Rotem Rosen and Omer Rosen in Supreme Court.
July 20, 2020 at 06:37 PM
3 minute read
A family dispute involving the Sapir Organization, a Manhattan-based real estate development firm, reached a new height July 17 when president and CEO Alex Sapir sued Rotem Rosen and Omer Rosen in New York County Supreme Court.
Rotem Rosen and Sapir's sister, Sapir Organization CMO Zina Sapir, are in the process of divorcing, according to court records. After they married in 2007, Rotem Rosen became increasingly involved in the organization's workings and "ending up holding himself out to third parties as its CEO," Sapir's attorney Terrence Oved of Oved & Oved wrote in the complaint.
Two of Rotem Rosen's brothers also took on high-ranking roles in the company, including Omer Rosen, who became general counsel.
From there, Rotem and Omer Rosen worked to enrich themselves at the expense of the Sapirs, according to the complaint. When Alex Sapir sought to end his partnership with Rotem Rosen in 2017, Rosen agreed to sign a "broad mutual general release specifically designed to permanently extricate and disentangle Rotem from Alex and the entire Sapir Organization and prevent him from extracting any more money from the Sapir family," which was completed in 2018 according to the complaint.
After Rotem Rosen signed the general release and became aware of his wife's plans for divorce, according to the complaint, he began executing a strategy to "gain as much leverage as possible against the Sapirs and maximize the cost for Zina's decision to divorce him."
He filed a $102,900,000 claim against the estate of the Sapir siblings' father Tamir Sapir, who founded the company and had died several years prior, according to the complaint, which describes the complaint as frivolous and an example of bad faith.
The Sapir family's motion to dismiss the claim is still pending in surrogate's court.
The complaint also accused Omer Rosen of breaching his fiduciary duty as general counsel and misappropriating hundreds of company files by emailing them to his personal address.
In an amended statement, Oved said the complaint aims to hold the Rosens accountable.
"As the complaint alleges, for over a decade, Rotem Rosen rode the Sapir Organization's coattails taking advantage of the Sapirs' trust and generosity to siphon tens of millions of dollars, misappropriate proprietary information, and violate the contractual terms of his ouster from the Sapir family and its business," he said. "Both Rotem, and his brother Omer, who allegedly conspired with him, have repaid our client's trust with betrayal and mistaken its kindness for weakness." Rotem Rosen's attorney, Kasowitz Benson Torres partner Sheron Korpus, issued a statement about the filing.
"The complaint is a desperate attempt to distract from Rotem's meritorious claims against the Sapir Estate and Alex Sapir's recent breaches of the contractual arrangements between him and Rotem, as will be demonstrated shortly," he said.
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