How angry an ex would you have to be to file racketeering
charges against your spouse? That’s a
question Elizabeth Bingham-Perry could answer. The Scarsdale resident filed a
civil RICO action against her husband Jeffrey Perry in the U.S. Southern
District’s Westchester courthouse last week.
Mr. Perry, it so happens, is an executive at Third Point LLC, the hedge
fund founded by Dan Loeb.
In the complaint, Ms. Bingham-Perry alleges that Mr. Perry
lied on net worth statements submitted by mail in the divorce proceedings,
concealing assets in excess of $1 million in offshore and other acounts. That’s
just the start. Mr. Perry’s entire career, his wife alleges, “has been marked
by repeated criminal activity in his quest to amass his fortune,” a claim she
rests on Mr. Perry’s alleged participation in a scheme to drive down the share
price of a Canadian company called Fairfax Financial.
Which is a pretty nasty thing to say about your husband of
23 years, and a crude but potentially useful cudgel for hammering out a
settlement.
(A little background: RICO is the Racketeer Influenced
Corrupt Organizations Act, passed by Congress in 1970 to allow the government
to prosecute mafia godfathers for crimes committed by their organizations, but
written broadly enough to apply to any person who uses an enterprise to engage
in a continuous pattern of criminal activity.)
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