After court fight with Loria and Jeter, Miami-Dade wins millions from Marlins sale
Jeffrey Loria and the Marlins did have some dollars to share with taxpayers after all.
Miami-Dade on Tuesday revealed a $4.2 million settlement with the former and current Marlins owners over a lawsuit the county filed to collect on a 2009 profit-sharing agreement Loria offered in exchange for nearly $500 million in public funds for a new ballpark and parking complex in Little Havana. Loria sold the team to Derek Jeter and partners for $1.2 billion eight years later but claimed he owed the local governments nothing — largely because he and partners deducted their tax bills on the windfall from the profit-sharing calculation. Jeter’s lawyers fought unsuccessfully to be dropped from the suit, claiming the payment fight was Loria’s alone.
The settlement agreement says a Loria entity, once called Miami Marlins LLC and now named WSC03, is making the settlement payments to Miami and Miami-Dade.
The county sued in 2018 under then-Mayor Carlos Gimenez, joined by Miami. Loria and Jeter fought the proceedings, with Jeter’s lawyers at one point citing a holding company in the British Virgin Islands to argue it had foreign ownership and qualified for a federal judge.
The case ended up back before a Miami-Dade judge, and now is headed for settlement. An agreement outlined in papers posted on the County Commission’s agenda shows Miami-Dade would receive $3.6 million and Miami $563,000. The original agreement granted Miami and Miami-Dade a combined 5% of the proceeds from a future Marlins sale.
A summary said the agreement, set for a county vote next Tuesday, followed several months of negotiations. The settlement papers are signed by David Samson, the team president under Loria, and Ashwin Krishnan, team general counsel under Jeter. A Marlins spokesperson and Samson had no immediate comment Tuesday.
A financial summary of the transaction that Loria’s lawyers gave the county in 2018 included a calculation under the 2009 agreement where he claimed a team he purchased for $158 million somehow yielded a $141 million loss on a $1.2 billion sale. Key to the accounting was a string of deductions allowed under the original agreement, including the underlying value of the franchise before the ballpark opened. One deduction Loria claimed was a $30 million fee to an investment banking firm owned by a top Marlins executive under Loria.
Loria’s accountants also deducted $296 million in taxes from the proceeds, flipping a $156 million profit to the $141 million loss. The $4.2 million settlement would equate to a profit of about $84 million, though the settlement agreement does not say how the overall payout was calculated. The payouts are described as “termination” payments, and not the “equity” payments described in the original profit-sharing agreement.
This story was updated after it was originally published online to reflect that the settlement payment is coming from a business entity of Jeffrey Loria’s.
This story was originally published January 26, 2021 at 8:59 PM.