December 1, 2013 — Fishermen have always braved bad weather and unstable economic conditions, John Lees of Marlees Seafood said. He never expected a court dispute to upend his livelihood. Lees said he was fighting the lawsuit to preserve his reputation in the tight-knit world of New Bedford, where he owns four scallop boats.
Three years ago, John Lees was looking to expand his seafood business in New Bedford. Prices for scallops were skyrocketing and Lees sensed the time was ripe to make a big move.
So it appeared fortuitous when, seemingly out of nowhere, a Lithuanian business tycoon offered to buy a majority stake in Lee’s company, Marlees Seafood, which the veteran fisherman founded 27 years ago out of the back of his car.
“They told me they wanted to buy up the entire industry,” Lees recalled of the offer from Julius Numavicius, whose family members are owners of a holding company with retail interests throughout Europe. “I was looking at becoming a big part of something. This was going to give me the scale that I believed I needed.”
Instead, what seemed like a promising marriage has soured into a dock fight.
Numavicius is accusing Lees of bilking him out of more than $22 million, according to papers filed in US District Court in Boston in October. Numavicius alleges that Lees, who remained Marlees’s chief executive for two years after the September 2010 deal, inflated Marlees’s value at the time of the sale, engaged in a series of schemes and kickbacks and secretly competed with Marlees by investing in friends’ businesses.
Lees expressly denied the allegations in Numavicius’s lawsuit. And he has countered with his own court actions, including a motion asking the judge to dismiss the lawsuit. Separately Lees filed a lawsuit in Suffolk Superior Court seeking $6.3 million in damages from Numavicius for their falling out. That case is in arbitration.
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