Frank Stronach sues daughter in battle over company control

Racing operations will continue as usual at the tracks and racing companies owned and operated by The Stronach Group despite a stunning lawsuit filed this month by the founder of the company, Frank Stronach, against his daughter Belinda and a former chief executive, a top official for the company said on Wednesday.

The suit, which Daily Racing Form has not been able to obtain, was filed Oct. 1 in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Toronto, according to Thoroughbred Daily News, which reported on the lawsuit Wednesday. According to the report, the lawsuit alleges that Belinda Stronach and the former CEO, Alon Ossip, mismanaged company funds and illegally appropriated control of family trusts affiliated with the company. Frank Stronach is seeking $400 million in restitution and damages, according to TDN.

Tim Ritvo, the chief operating officer of The Stronach Group, who has responsibility for the company’s racing assets, said on Wednesday that he would not comment on the suit. But he said that for now, it would have no bearing on racing operations.

“The day-to-day operations of the company will continue as usual,” Ritvo said.

The news landed as a bombshell in the racing industry. The Stronach Group controls some of the most valuable racing properties in the U.S., including Breeders’ Cup- and Triple Crown-hosting racetracks, prominent breeding farms, and a handful of the hyphenated cogs that make the racing industry work: simulcast-marketing, bet-processing, and account-wagering.

Although weighty, the suit did not come as a surprise to the long line of former executives who had served often short stints at the company and have universally described a chaotic work environment at the company and endless struggles for power.

However, it is unclear whether the suit will lead to a significant impact on the racing assets. According to the TDN report, TSG contains “253 Stronach-family-owned corporations, trusts, and other entities established in various jurisdictions around the world.” Those entities include non-racing investments such as organic farms, retail products, and real estate spanning the globe, according to current and former TSG officials.

Three of those officials said on Wednesday that the conflicts outlined in the lawsuit involve power struggles over the control of trusts that are not directly related to the racing assets. One official said the racing assets within TSG have no debt attached to them and have historically generated positive cash flow, unlike some other initiatives launched by TSG since it was formed in 2011.

Chantelle Cseh, an attorney with the Toronto law firm handling the lawsuit on behalf of Stronach, declined to provide the suit on Thursday. Attorneys at the firm did not respond to calls on Wednesday.

“We are not taking steps to distribute that statement of claim,” Cseh said.

Michael Barrack, an attorney representing Belinda Stronach, had not responded to a phone call by Thursday afternoon. Calls to TSG’s corporate office in Toronto seeking Belinda Stronach for comment were not returned Wednesday.

Frank Stronach, 86, who was once estimated to have a net worth of more than $1 billion, has played a nondescript role in the management of TSG over the past five years as he initially attempted political relevancy in his native Austria. However, according to TDN, the suit states that he sought to return to management of the company beginning in 2014, only to be thwarted by his daughter and Ossip.

According to TDN, the suit alleges a variety of misdeeds by Belinda Stronach and Ossip, including “breach of fiduciary duty, breach of trust, and unlawful means of conspiracy.” The suit is seeking $192.5 million in compensation “for all losses, damages, or harm suffered as a result of the defendants’ unlawful or oppressive conduct.” The suit also seeks a total of $208 million in punitive damages on behalf of Frank Stronach, the entities related to TSG, and a web of family trusts associated with the company, according to TDN.

Over the past two years, Belinda Stronach has increasingly been portrayed as TSG’s leading executive, most prominently during the lead-up and staging of high-profile televised racing events such as the Preakness Stakes, held at the company’s Pimlico Race Course in Maryland, and the Pegasus World Cup, a highly unusual, lucrative racing event at Gulfstream Park in Florida that has been aggressively promoted by Belinda.

Inside the racing world, however, the day-to-day management of the company’s wide swath of properties has been led by executives with lower-ranking titles.

Belinda Stronach took the titular helm of TSG sometime in 2016, though her elevation to chairwoman and president of the company was never formally announced publicly. The suit claims that she began working at the company in 2013, although former officials of the company said she was briefly appointed to run its racing and entertainment division after it was formed in 2011.

Ossip, who had formerly worked at several of Frank Stronach’s auto ventures and had been at TSG since its formation in 2011, is no longer listed as CEO of the company, and several officials said he was fired after a blowup with Frank Stronach last year that involved Belinda as well.

Through a spokesperson, Ossip released a statement that said the allegations in the suit “are baseless and are not grounded in fact and reality.” The statement went on to say that Ossip “has always honored his obligations and acted in good faith to preserve and grow the Stronach family’s assets and to protect the interests of all members of the family.” It also said that Frank Stronach’s “recent excessive spending and numerous failed ventures put his family’s wealth at risk.”

“This is a dispute between Stronach family members that should be resolved between family members,” the statement concluded.

According to the suit, Belinda Stronach and Ossip took on greater day-to-day management of the company’s operations in 2013 after Frank Stronach resigned his positions at the company to return to Austria with ambitions to strengthen a right-wing political party, known as Team Stronach, that he had founded in 2012.

With his resignation, Stronach signed over control of family trusts to his daughter and other family members, according to several former TSG officials, but, according to the suit, “all members of the family, including Belinda, understood and agreed that Frank would maintain control of the family business as the creator of the family’s wealth,” according to a passage from the suit quoted by TDN.

The suit states that Frank Stronach resigned his positions with the Austrian political party in 2014 and returned to Canada to take a more

active role in TSG. However, in November 2016, according to the suit, “Belinda and Alon informed Frank for the first time that TSG was facing significant liquidity issues,” which “came as a surprise to Frank and raised red flags about their management of TSG.

“Frank later learned that during this period, Belinda and Alon seriously neglected the business of TSG and abused their positions of authority,” the suit alleges, according to TDN. “They did so in order to conceal significant cash-flow issues and to favour their own personal interests at the direct expense of rights and interests of other members of the Stronach family.”

The suit outlines a series of power struggles that took place over the next several years, including allegations that Belinda and Ossip began asserting “that Frank had no authority to act in the name of any of the businesses owned or operated by TSG” and “had no signing authority or ability to access corporate funds.” The suit states that on Jan. 9, 2017, Frank Stronach “reappointed himself” to several of the family trusts, but that Belinda then asserted it was not legal to do so.

The suit states that Belinda Stronach has paid “exorbitant salaries” to unqualified executives at the company and has submitted reimbursement requests for “hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal expenses” for vacations, limousine hires, and meals, “none of which related to legitimate business expenses.”

Belinda Stronach has shuttled in and out of management titles at a variety of her father’s companies over the past 20 years. She was also a Member of Parliament in the House of Commons of Canada from 200408, first as a conservative, then as a liberal.

TSG was formed in 2011 as part of a deal in which Frank Stronach gave up control of MI Developments, a publicly traded real-estate company that also owned and operated the racing assets he had initially procured through other publicly traded companies he controlled. Under the deal, Stronach took possession of the racing assets by giving up his supermajority voting shares in MI Developments plus $20 million in cash.

At the time, the racing assets included Santa Anita Park, Golden Gate Fields, Gulfstream Park and its attached casino, the Palm Meadows training center in Florida, a 50 percent stake in Laurel Park and Pimlico Race Course in Maryland, the account-wagering company XpressBet, the betprocessing company AmTote, and Portland Meadows in Oregon, substantially the same list of racing assets that TSG owns today, in addition to its non-racing assets.

The racing assets were valued at between $585 million and $730 million by a firm that evaluated the deal for MI Developments struck in 2011.

Frank Stronach’s use of funds from publicly traded companies he controlled to buy racetracks and racing-related companies generated intense pushback from shareholders. All told, the racing assets lost hundreds of millions of dollars for their parent companies, leading shareholders to push for the assets to be unloaded when debts and losses began piling up at MI Developments.

Just prior to the MI Developments deal closing, Stronach sold $850 million worth of stock in the auto-parts company he founded, Magna. That company had provided the seed capital for Stronach to acquire racing assets beginning with the purchase of Santa Anita in 1998, but the racing assets were later spun off into another company, Magna Entertainment, that went bankrupt. MI Developments was formed to operate the former racing assets of Magna Entertainment and as a holding company for real-estate deals before its dissolution.

TSG and its predecessors have been characterized by a revolving door of managers, some of whom left under disputed terms. Earlier this year, a former head of the company’s California operations, Keith Brackpool, filed suit against the company seeking $40 million for breach of contract. Many of the former managers are required to sign nondisclosure deals in order to retain severance payments, and the company’s financial condition has been opaque since it was formed.