Wellington man still without $4M yacht he bought

It’s been three years since Kevin Turner, a Wellington home builder, paid $4 million to a Fort Lauderdale yacht dealer to have a brand new 74-foot Sunseeker Sport Yacht built in England.

After his money seemingly disappeared amid a conflict between dealer Rick Obey & Associates and Sunseeker, Turner remains embroiled in costly litigation with Obey for the return of his money or a boat.

The boat he paid to have built was sold to someone else months ago. Turner says his dream has been crushed.

“I’d take a boat, money, little boats, big boat, anything to get close to being made whole,” he said in an interview.

Instead, the three entities continue to bicker in court filings, hearings and depositions over which is responsible for Turner’s loss.

Obey, a longtime yacht dealer based in Fort Lauderdale, says Sunseeker had been holding $3.8 million that it had obtained from Obey’s company and failed to apply $2.2 million of it toward the completion of Turner’s boat, as Obey had instructed.

Sunseeker, a prestigious yacht builder based in the coastal town of Poole, England, accuses Obey of violating terms of their dealer agreement by not directly submitting money and contracts for specific manufacturing agreements, including Turner’s.

Turner contends that of the $4 million he paid to Obey, including an older yacht valued at $2 million, only his $362,000 deposit was sent to Sunseeker.

In an April deposition in New York, Obey’s former office assistant repeatedly asserted her Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination to a long list of questions by Sunseeker’s attorneys, including whether she summoned Turner to make a final $998,000 payment with no intention of sending it to Sunseeker.

Obey attorney Robert Goldman said in an interview that the assistant took the Fifth on the advice of her personal attorney after attorneys for Turner and Sunseeker questioned her integrity.

In a cross-claim filed in Turner’s suit on June 20, Sunseeker accused Obey of making “fraudulent misrepresentations” to Turner and other customers by telling them their money was being used to pay Sunseeker “with the intention of failing to pay Sunseeker.”

‘I’ve done nothing wrong’

After initially suing Obey and Sunseeker, Turner settled with Sunseeker for “a portion” of the $4 million he paid, but says the amount is confidential.

“I’m clearly the victim here and I have done nothing wrong,” Turner said. “It has been constant stress for the last three-plus years. This whole mess has contributed to the loss of my marriage.”

Turner said he decided to buy the yacht in 2018 when his wife was “gravely ill” and the couple thought she wouldn’t have long to live. They were going to spend her last days sailing the Mediterranean, he said. She has since recovered, he said, but stress from the lawsuit and other issues have forced the couple to separate.

The saga with Obey and Sunseeker stretches back years and has deep tentacles.

Sunseeker was building Turner’s boat in 2018 when, unbeknownst to Turner, trouble began brewing between Obey and Sunseeker, Turner said. Sunseeker was also building boats for four other Obey clients and six boats that Obey had ordered to have on hand at his dealership to sell to customers right away, according to documents filed in the case.

Goldman said the companies had a standing agreement to periodically “reallocate” deposits and stage payments from new customers toward construction of previously ordered boats.

Their relationship worked well, with Obey delivering 85 Sunseeker boats over the years, Goldman said.

“Everyone has always gotten their boat except Mr. Turner,” Goldman said. “Rick [Obey] never thought Turner was not going to get his boat.”

Turner and Sunseeker contend that Sunseeker’s contract with Obey required Sunseeker to authorize any reallocation of money from one buyer to complete another buyer’s boat, and Sunseeker claims the company did not authorize it in Turner’s case.

Mounting disputes

In court filings, Obey says the relationship began to fray when Sunseeker stopped reimbursing Obey for warranty work it performed on Sunseeker products and started looking for other dealers to sell its products in Obey’s territory.

Sunseeker said in court filings that it did not breach its agreement with Obey by failing to pay for warranty services and that Obey did not seek reimbursement for warranty services until after its dealer agreement was terminated in March 2019.

Sunseeker, Obey contended in a court filing, delayed taking responsibility for a catastrophic engine failure that occurred just after one of Obey’s customers took possession of his boat in March 2018. Obey took the defective boat back but was out $7 million for a year before the repairs were made, he said. As a result, he “slowed down” payments he was supposed to make to Sunseeker for purchase of other boats, Obey said.

Turner claimed in his lawsuit that Obey had stopped paying Sunseeker for the six boats it was building for Obey to sell at his dealership, which caused Sunseeker to hold back delivery of the five boats ordered by Obey’s customers.

Sunseeker and Obey battled each other in a separate lawsuit over Sunseeker’s termination of Obey’s dealer contract. Obey claimed Sunseeker had no right to terminate the contract while Sunseeker sought $11 million from Obey.

The arbitrator ruled that Obey did not owe Sunseeker $11 million, but that it had the right to terminate the contract. After two arbitration sessions over two years, Obey was ordered to stop representing himself as a Sunseeker dealer and pay $352,000 in legal fees to Sunseeker. But so far, Obey has not paid “one cent,” Sunseeker claimed in a recent filing. As a result, Sunseeker has been seeking financial records from Obey to “trace the dissipation” of his company’s assets, Sunseeker said.

‘Boating was my passion’

The other four clients whose boats were under construction when the disputes erupted in early 2019 have all worked out settlements with Sunseeker and have received their boats, Turner and Goldman each said.

Turner not only sued Sunseeker along with Obey over the $4 million he paid Obey, he later filed a federal maritime suit and had the boat placed under federal “arrest” when Sunseeker brought it to the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show in November 2019. The boat was released a few months later when a judge ruled that Turner’s sales contract with Obey did not give him any right to deprive Sunseeker of the boat.

In her order, U.S. District Judge Cecilia Altonaga called Turner and his wife “victims of [Obey’s] undeniable breach of the Purchase Agreement,” stating that Obey “willingly accepted” the couple’s payments and failed to remit the money to Sunseeker. Obey’s “last-minute requests” in March and April 2019 that Sunseeker “reallocate” funds it was holding toward purchase of several other boats under order were “merely window dressing.”

“Such ‘reallocations’ were not the parties’ customary business practice, nor were they addressed in any relevant contract between the parties,” Altonaga wrote.

Turner believes Sunseeker would have likely delivered his boat if Obey had transferred to Sunseeker the $998,000 final payment that Obey asked him to pay to close the deal.

After his boat was released from federal custody, Sunseeker transferred it to a dealer who put it on the market and sold it, Turner said.

Goldman said that public airing of the dispute has hurt reputations of both Obey and Sunseeker, but Turner questioned why Obey won’t settle the matter with him and put an end to the three-year court battle.

“It was never my intention to hurt Obey,” Turner said. “But he hurt me and made it [through the litigation] like I had done something wrong. It cost me a lot. Boating was my passion in life. The one thing that made me happy. One of the things I shared with my wife. It was taken from me.”