Haim Saban’s ex-tax lawyer sues mogul, seeks $36 million sitting in Austrian bank
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Updated with Saban statement at bottom.
Media mogul Haim Saban, who paid the government about $250 million to settle charges of tax evasion, is now in a battle over the $36-million commission his tax lawyer got for putting Saban in the illegal tax shelter in the first place.
Saban, pictured at right, is accused in a civil suit filed today in Los Angeles County Superior Court by his former tax lawyer, Matthew Krane, of trying to take the commission that Krane received from Quellos Group, a Seattle-based investment firm that cooked up the illegal tax shelter scheme. Krane parked the money in an Austrian bank, and Saban last year filed a suit there laying claim to the money, an action that has effectively frozen the assets.
Krane, once a powerful Hollywood lawyer and the brother of movie producer Jonathan Krane, is not exactly an angel himself -- he has spent the last year in a federal holding pen in Los Angeles on charges of identity theft and passport fraud. He has since been hit with a money laundering charge as well. When the IRS searched Matthew Krane’s home in 2008, the agency found methamphetamine as well as materials to make a fake passport.
The origins of this tawdry battle stem from the sale of Fox Family Channel from Saban and News Corp. to Walt Disney Co. in 2001 for $5.2 billion. Saban made a capital gain of $1.5 billion on that sale and Krane was tapped to minimize Saban’s pain. He turned to Quellos Group, which manged to turn Saban’s gain into a loss until the the government jumped in and charged Quellos Group with tax fraud.
A spokeswoman for Saban called Krane’s suit ‘frivolous’ and said it was a ‘transparent attempt to distract from Mr. Saban’s right to recover the money stolen from him by Mr. Krane.’
-- Joe Flint
