A wealthy Saudi Arabian family has settled a federal lawsuit against a Newport Beach man who had been accused of being a key player in a $9 billion global Ponzi scheme.
The Algosaibi family and its partnership Ahmad Hamad Algosaibi and Brothers issued a press release this week announcing their suit filed in March 2011 in Los Angeles against Glenn Stewart, former chief executive of The International Banking Corp. in Bahrain, has been dropped. Stewart has also been an executive producer on a dozen or so films with title like The Messenger, New York, I Love You and Lesbian Vampire Killers.
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Another Stewart credit was his former work for the Algosaibi family. Their suit accused him of being part of a massive international fraud and money laundering scheme that his lawyer, Haig V. Kalbian, claims stems from an internal family feud dating back to 2009.
As part of the settlement, Stewart will not have to pay the Saudi family money, only information. He is to meet with Algosaibi attorneys to discuss what they consider questionable transactions. That will prove more valuable than any judgment the family could have won, says their lawyer Eric Lewis in a City News Service report.
But Kalbian says in the same piece the settlement is a victory for his client.
“After several years of scorched earth litigation where we chipped away at the plaintiff's case, we feel totally vindicated by this settlement,” Kalbian said. “We knew that this case should never have been brought against Glenn Stewart. The fact that the other side has
walked away from the case for no money speaks volumes.”
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.