Anaheim City Council votes unanimously to halt the sale of Angel Stadium

ANAHEIM — The Angel Stadium deal is dead.

The Anaheim City Council voted unanimously late Tuesday night to kill the sale of Angel Stadium and the surrounding property, in the process bracing for what city councilmen said could be a long and nasty legal battle with Angels owner Arte Moreno.

On the day after mayor Harry Sidhu resigned amid an FBI investigation into the so-called “cabal” that runs the city, Councilman Jose Moreno said the probe had raised the curtain on what he called “a pandemic of corruption” in Anaheim and called the stadium deal “the fruit of a poisoned tree.”

The council asked the city attorney to notify the Angels of the decision Wednesday, the start of a process in which the city would ask the Orange County Superior Court to declare the deal invalid because of “concerns of conflict of interest and that the transaction was not at arm’s length,” as the attorney for Moreno’s management company had said in a letter that demanded the council approve the sale.

In the absence of a settlement with the Angels, Councilman Stephen Faessel said the termination “is going to be litigated for the next several years” and said he did not anticipate a window to reopen negotiations with the Angels before then.

The decision to terminate the deal does not leave the Angels homeless. Because the sale hasn’t been finalized, the stadium remains under the ownership of the city, and the Angels remain under a lease that binds the team to Angel Stadium through at least 2029. The team has the option to stay through 2038.

Under the terms of the sale agreement, if Anaheim kills the deal, the city could refund the $50 million Arte Moreno already has put into escrow, plus up to $5 million in his “transaction costs” and potential legal fees. However, the city’s preliminary legal position is that the alleged fraud might relieve the city of that burden — and could trigger a court to order Arte Moreno’s company to pay the city’s legal costs.

Arte Moreno, who formed the management company to develop the Angel Stadium property, also could sue the city for breach of contract.