Florida GOP fundraisers locked in business dispute
It’s a legal battle between two titans in Florida Republican fundraising circles, and tens of millions of dollars are at stake: Zach Zachariah, a Broward County cardiologist who has raised millions of dollars for GOP candidates, versus A.K. Desai, a St. Petersburg insurance executive and the Florida Republican party’s new finance chairman.
Zachariah filed a lawsuit Friday in Miami-Dade circuit court accusing Desai of freezing him out of their jointly owned company and costing him millions of dollars by diluting his ownership share.
“In 2008 he just decided he wanted me off the board, and I’m one of the founders of the Universal Health Group,” Zachariah said, referring to the company Desai leads with roughly 1,000 employees in downtown St. Petersburg. “Under the bylaws he just can’t do that.”
The suit contends Desai unilaterally and improperly kicked Zachariah off Universal’s board of directors and subsequently issued tens of millions of additional shares of Universal stock without authorization. As a result, Zachariah’s ownership stake in the privately held company shrank from nearly 20 percent to nearly 14 percent.
“Universal has an entity value of hundreds of millions of dollars. Therefore at least tens of millions of dollars of (Zachariah’s) ownership stake in Universal purportedly has been stripped from him,” the lawsuit claims.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/04/02/2728467/florida-gop-fundraisers-locked.html#storylink=cpy
