A California Court of Appeal has blasted the owners of Saigon TV for dishonesty in their legal attempts to overturn a $472,000 judgement against them for cheating the founder of the Vietnamese language station in Little Saigon.
Following a 2010 jury trial in Orange County Superior Court, Larry Phan–the Vietnam War refugee who founded Saigon TV–was awarded damages after proving that defendants Nam Nguyen, Diane Ai-Phuong Truong and Bao-Quoc Nguyen violated good faith and fair dealing covenants, broke their fiduciary duties, committed defamation, intentionally lied and purposefully inflicted emotional distress.
The bitter mess happened after Phan, a retired Los Angeles County social worker, agreed to sell the Westminster-based station to Nguyen and Truong in 2003 for $518,000, but stayed on as president for $4,000 a month until he was rudely fired without notice in 2008.
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Claiming there was insufficient evidence of their wrongdoing and the
awarded damages were excessive, Nguyen and Truong appealed the verdicts that favored Phan.
But this month a three-justice
appellate panel based in Santa Ana slammed their appeal brief for “its
complete failure to fairly recite” facts in the case. The unamused
justices also noted that key trial evidence, a video by a station security
guard stalking Phan, had been brazenly doctored to support the
defendants.
“Because the defendants have simply ignored evidence
in their brief, needless to say, they have engaged in no reasoned
analysis of whether it is sufficient to support a judgment against them,”
wrote Justice Kathleen E. O'Leary on behalf of justices Richard M. Aronson and Richard D. Fybel.
In the end, the justices sanctioned Phan's court victory as legally justified.
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CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.