After years of legal and public relations duels, Motorola may be edging closer to a payday. If, that is, it can locate the borrowers.
A court decision rejected the appeal of the Uzan family, who owns Turkish No. 2 carrier Telsim, and asked them to pay the wireless vendor $4.6 billion.
The Uzan family had collected the loan from Motorola and Nokia Corp. in a vendor financing deal in 1999. The demand for the loan payback led to a flurry of court appearances. Claims and counter-claims included full-page ads placed in major newspapers in the United States from Teslim stating its position.
Reports said, however, that the Uzans have not been reached because no one knows their whereabouts. Turkish police have launched searches around the country to detain five Uzans and seven other members of a bank seized in July by banking authorities.
A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in New York said the Uzans should pay the owed sum of money. In the absence of payments, Motorola’s lawyers said the company will confiscate the assets of the family frozen in scattered places around the world.
The Uzans had requested that the matter be settled through arbitration in a Swiss court rather in the United States. In its ad blitz, the family had attributed the carrier’s failure to meet its payment obligations to a series of earthquakes that shook Turkey in 1999 and 2000.
The family also tried to show that Motorola management had failed to inform its shareholders that the loans “are a 100-percent loss,” although “in confidential negotiation in 2000 and 2001, Telsim and its principal owners offered concessions to try to agree on a rescheduling of the Motorola debt.”
The company had accused Motorola of launching a defamatory media campaign against the Telsim owners, bringing unfounded charges about violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations laws against the Uzans and having individuals spy on them through the use of illegal methods and parties. A recent Swiss court decision on the case has been nullified by the U.S. court decision. Nokia said it was happy with the court decision, according to Laurie Armstrong, the company’s spokeswoman.
Motorola had in the past written off $2 billion of the loan.
