TARRED EX-CEO IS PAID!
iPayment $ettles
After watching his reputation get dragged through the mud in a lurid, yearlong legal drama, a former CEO has scored an $11 million payday.
Carl Grimstad, the ousted chief executive of payment processor iPayment, landed the fat settlement after battling allegations that he looted half a million dollars from the company’s coffers to fund his wife’s shopping sprees — as well as his own alleged penchant for strip clubs and escorts.
“While [Grimstad] is saddened that he and his family were subjected to the false and meritless allegations made against them by iPayment in what can only be described as a retaliatory lawsuit, he is pleased with the settlement,” a spokesperson for Grimstad told The Post.
Grimstad will get a cash payment of $3 million and $4 million in preferred stock.
He also will be retained as a special adviser to iPayment, earning $220,000 a month for the next 18 months, court documents show.
Grimstad sued iPayment last September in New York state court, claiming he was wrongfully terminated in a plot orchestrated by the company’s hedge fund creditors led by New Jersey-based Chatham Asset Management.
Firing back, iPayment filed an explosive suit in February against Grimstad and his wife, accusing them of using iPay- ment as their personal “piggybank.”
The suit, filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, painted Grimstad as an oddly benevolent thief with a weakness for women.
Grimstad’s wife Jessica “Gigi” Grimstad — “a bit player on the New York social scene,” according to court papers — went on a $70,000 shopping spree at swanky shops including Bergdorf Goodman on the company dime, iPayment alleged.
Meanwhile, the other ladies in Grimstad’s life — a Las Vegas escort and her mother — scored jobs at iPayment, the company said.
That was after the escort, who met Grimstad at a Las Vegas strip club called the Spearmint Rhino in 2007, got invited back to Grimstad’s hotel room, where the exec allegedly offered her $4,000 “in exchange for certain sexual activities,” the company’s suit said.
Both the escort and her mother worked at iPayment for four years, with the escort getting a $37,000 severance package after being fired in 2012, court papers say.
“The Company recognizes that the Grimstads believe that the allegations in the lawsuit were false,” iPayment said in a statement on the settlement.
“[IPayment] regrets any distress that may have been caused to the Grimstads by the public filing of the litigation against them.”