Lawyer shut out in bid for father’s Leafs ducats
Season tickets belong to company: court
TORONTO Season tickets for the Toronto Maple Leafs are so hard to get, they’re worth going to court over.
A Toronto lawyer who won the right to fight for a larger share of her father’s more-than-$100-million fortune has lost her claim to Leafs tickets in his name after a judge ruled they actually belonged to Chaim Neuberger’s former company.
It will be difficult and expensive for Edie Neuberger to replace the season tickets she lost in the judgment, should she want to.
Inheriting season tickets is by far the easiest way to get them. The Air Canada Centre has 18,900 seats available for Leafs games, and 15,500 of them belong to season ticket holders. In March, 99.5 per cent of those tickets were renewed — meaning just 77 became available for sale to the 10,000 people on a waiting list. At that rate, and assuming each person wants two tickets, it will take 250 years to clear the list.
The Neuberger ruling published online on June 1 did not mention where the seats were located in the Air Canada Centre. Last year, season ticket holders paid between $1,681 and $8,487 for 41 games.
Holocaust survivor Chaim Neuberger and Harry Sporer together built up a “tremen- dously successful” real estate business in Toronto after the Second World War. The partners each amassed “assets in the hundreds of millions of dollars,” according to Ontario Superior Court Justice Laurence A. Pattillo’s ruling. When Neuberger died aged 86 on Sept. 25, 2012, his fortune was divided between his daughters, Edie and Myra.
A pair of season hockey tickets were registered in Chaim Neuberger’s name and were passed to his estate. But his former company filed a claim for the tickets. Pattillo agreed that the real estate mogul was actually just holding the tickets in trust for Nuspor — a partnership comprised of two companies: one controlled by Sporer, and another controlled by Neuberger until he died.
Sporer testified that he and Neuberger were offered the tickets by a business contact in the late 1960s or early ’70s. He said they were told they could not be registered under Nuspor. The judge agreed this was the only reason the tickets were put in Neuberger’s name. Nuspor provided evidence that the company paid for the tickets each year.
Edie Neuberger’s legal team said her father did not take advantage of the chance to purchase seat licences for the tickets in 2002 and argued that this proved he did not want them to be transferred into Nuspor’s name. But Pattillo wrote that, “the refusal is more about not wanting to pay the exorbitant licence fee” to Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment.