Category Archives: Television: TV News Reports, Stories & Interviews

Costco accused of improper sales tax charges on toilet paper in New Jersey

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CNBC.com
by Dan Mangan
Friday, September 16, 2016, 2:18 PM

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/09/16/costco-accused-of-improper-sales-tax-charges-on-toilet-paper-in-new-jersey.html

Don’t you know you’re not supposed to squeeze the Charmin toilet paper — or charge sales tax on it?

A New Jersey couple on Friday filed a class-action lawsuit against Costco Wholesale and several of its stores, claiming the membership-only warehouse giant has been illegally overcharging them — and potentially hundreds of thousands of other customers — by charging sales tax on toilet tissue purchases in violation of state law.

Toilet tissue sold for household use is exempt from New Jersey’s 7 percent sales tax.

But the couple, Jacqueline Taufield and Robert Arnold, said that they were charged the tax when they purchased Charmin toilet tissue on July 26, 2015, from a Costco in Wayne, New Jersey, and then again when they picked up some more Charmin in a Costco in Hackensack five days later.

The suit said that when the Leonia couple complained to Costco management after realizing they had been charged sale tax improperly, “they refused to issue a rebate to them.”

The couple’s lawyer, Rosemarie Arnold, said, “Rather than refund [Robert’s] money, they told him, ‘Well, if you believe that, you have to mail your receipt to the corporate headquarters along with a letter and tell the corporate headquarters how you were improperly charged tax.'”

The couple was “annoyed and angry” about the charge, and that response, said Arnold, who is not related to Robert.

“The obvious solution is to say, ‘You’re absolutely right … we made a mistake, here’s your money back,’ ” the lawyer said.

The suit says that Costco “despite being aware of the illegality of their actions… continues to cheat their customers, causing them to incur monetary damages when they purchase toilet tissue.”

The claim, filed in Bergen County Superior Court, alleges violation of the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act, breach of contract, unjust enrichment, negligence, violation of the state’s “Truth-in-Consumer Contract,” and fraud.

A Costco spokeswoman, when asked for comment on the suit, said, “Unfortunately, we are not able to provide a response at this time.”

Arnold, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, said the amount of tax charged improperly in the couple’s case is less than $1.50 in each purchase.

But nonetheless, Arnold said, “I think it’s huge problem” for Costco and its customers because of the likelihood that the couple were not the only ones subject to the incorrect tax charging.

Costco has 19 warehouse locations in New Jersey, according to the company’s website. And the suit says the class of potentially affected customers is more than 100,000 people.

Arnold said the potential damages for the class would be in the “millions of dollars.”

“Everybody uses toilet paper,” Arnold said. “You have to figure that a patron of Costco is always going to buy toilet paper.”

The lawyer also said it’s an open question of whether Costco “is actually paying the taxes to the government, or keeping the money?”

“Most likely, it’s the latter, because if they submitted tax resolutions to the government, the government would say, ‘This is an non-taxable item, it’s toilet paper,’ ” Arnold said.

A spokesman New Jersey’s Treasury Department, which oversees tax regulations, declined to comment on the lawsuit. But the spokesman noted that “large chain stores have point-of-sale cash registers that are programmed to charge sales tax on a variety of items.”

The spokesman also noted that the department does investigate complaints about stores improperly collecting or not collecting sales tax, and that anyone can file such a complaint anonymously.

CNBC.com: “Sanofi whistleblower lawsuit kicks into higher gear”

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Sanofi whistleblower lawsuit kicks into higher gear
by Dan Mangan
CNBC.com
Friday, 20 Nov 2015 | 2:38 PM ET

Read the full article at: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/11/20/sanofi-whistleblower-lawsuit-kicks-into-higher-gear.html

A whistleblowing former paralegal at drug giant Sanofi is now claiming she was aware of “many instances” where Sanofi lawyers destroyed documents to avoid turning them over to opponents in prior legal cases.

Ex-Sanofi paralegal Diane Ponte’s new allegation comes in an affidavit she filed in her pending lawsuit against the company.

Ponte’s suit, filed last year, claims she learned of an alleged scheme at Sanofi to pay more than $30 million in kickbacks to promote the company’s diabetes drugs. The suit came a year after the France-based drug company already agreed to pay more than $100 million to the U.S. federal government to settle other claims related to alleged kickbacks to doctors, and seven months after Sanofi agreed to pay a nearly $40 million fine in Germany in connection with two employees who were convicted there of paying bribes to boost drug sales.

“Prior to my last position with Sanofi, I had been working in the Sanofi litigation department for approximately seven years,” Ponte wrote in her affidavit in Newark, New Jersey, court. “In the course of my working in the Sanofi litigation department, I became personally aware of many instances in which documents were deliberately destroyed by Sanofi attorneys to avoid turning over said documents in discovery.”

The term “discovery” refers to the process in which opponents in civil litigation exchange documents and other evidence that are relevant to issues in their case, and which could affect the outcome of that case.

Sanofi, when contacted by CNBC about ongoing issues related to Ponte’s case, said, “Sanofi does not comment on pending litigation.” Last year, when Ponte’s case was filed, it referred to her as a “disgruntled former employee who is opportunistically attacking our company,” and called her allegations of employment law violations “without merit.”

However, Sanofi attorney John Bennett recently argued in legal motions that Ponte’s claim of document destruction was “false, scandalous and unsupported by any evidence.”

Bennett also said that Ponte, while working at Sanofi, had never reported any such document destruction to the company’s internal complaints system despite that she would have had an obligation to do so under Sanofi’s Code of Business Conduct.

But Essex County Judge Michelle Hollar-Gregory refused during a hearing last week to strike the paragraph in Ponte’s affidavit that alleges the document destruction by Sanofi’s lawyers.

Court filings reveal other new details in the case.

Ponte’s affidavit says that Sanofi’s North American general counsel, Robert DeBerardine, and another lawyer at the company, Edward Berg, were not licensed to practice law in New Jersey for at least part of the time they were working as lawyers at Sanofi. That’s despite Sanofi’s North American headquarters, where Ponte had worked, being located in that state, and despite a state Supreme Court rule requiring in-house counsel at a company to obtain at least a limited license if they want to practice law in the state.

Sanofi claims in court papers that the two attorneys’ law license status isn’t relevant to Ponte’s case, particularly since they were licensed to practice elsewhere in the United States. Sanofi also claims that DeBerardine applied for limited in-house counsel status in April 2013 and had it granted just last month. Berg’s own June 2015 application for that status “is currently pending,” the company said.

Ponte’s suit filed last December claims that she was fired in September 2014 in retaliation for bringing the alleged kickback scheme to light, which led to an internal probe at Sanofi. She also claims that Sanofi’s board fired then-CEO Christopher Viehbacher in October 2014 “in part” because Viehbacher “was involved in the aforesaid illegal and/or fraudulent activity.”

The suit from Ponte alleges she was pressured in March 2013 to approve nine pending contracts Sanofi had with Accenture and Deloitte worth a total of $34 million. Her suit says that despite that she was being asked to review the contracts’ legality, she learned they had actually been executed by Sanofi executive Raymond Godleski four months beforehand.

Her suit claims she determined that the contracts involved illegal incentives from the three companies to “induce customers, including physicians, hospitals and/or retail pharmacy programs such as Walgreens and Rite Aid to [among other things] influence the prescribing of drugs and/or improperly ‘switch’ from selling other manufacturers’ drugs … to selling Sanofi drugs, in violation of the aforesaid Federal healthcare laws.”

Such alleged kickbacks or incentives are illegal because they can encourage the prescription of drugs covered by federal Medicare and Medicaid insurance programs, which in turn could mean that those programs end up paying more in reimbursements than they otherwise would have.

In 2012, Sanofi agreed to pay the federal government $109 million to resolve allegations that the company violated the federal False Claims Act by giving physicians free units of the knee injection Hyalgan in order to induce them to buy and prescribe the drug, in violation of the Anti-Kickback Statute.

In March 2013, two ex-Sanofi employees were sentenced by a court in Germany to suspended sentences, and Sanofi was fined 28 million euros ($29.8 million) in connection with a bribery case there. A spokesman for prosecutors told the Reuters news agency that the former employees made illicit payments to a consulting company that was advising a Sanofi client in order to get the client to order more drugs from Sanofi.

“Sanofi was unfairly given preference because of this,” the spokesman told Reuters. A spokesman for Sanofi told that news agency earlier this year that the company had cooperated with the probe and had tightened its compliance system.

Also related to the ongoing case in New Jersey, Judge Hollar-Gregory last week refused, as least for now, to order Ponte or her lawyers to give back to the company documents related to Sanofi that are in their possession.

A CNBC reporter was present when Sanofi’s lawyer Bennett argued in court that many if not all of the documents are subject to attorney-client privilege, and that Ponte had stolen the documents.

“It’s not true!” angrily protested one of Ponte’s lawyers, Chris Stueben, when Bennett referred to Ponte’s alleged “stealing” of company information.

Ponte’s lead lawyer, Rosemarie Arnold, said that many of the documents would not be subject to attorney-client privilege because they were seen by people not connected to Sanofi’s legal department, as well as for other reasons.

“She was bullied by them,” Arnold said of Sanofi, which is accused in Ponte’s suit of creating a hostile work environment after she made her claims of wrongdoing there. “And now they’re trying to bully her some more.”

Among the documents that Ponte had in her possession is an email from one of Sanofi’s in-house lawyers, Berg, written on March 21, 2013, after he was asked to review some contracts that had been flagged by Ponte as having potential legal issues.

Berg’s email, which is in court records, has the subject line “contracts with Accenture.”

Berg, writing that he was giving “a relatively quick review,” said in the email that “the contract has almost no meaningful deliverables, is poorly constructed and incorrectly mentions Regulatory Review, with no mention of Legal review, when in fact the issues are most likely to create legal risk (kickback) rather than regulatory.”

“My initial overall take is that the contract violates almost every principal of financial stewardship and good business practices, with few deliverables, an outlandishly short time frame, no consideration as to the clear legal issues in these types of engagements with customers,” Berg wrote.

Despite Berg’s apparent concern, Ponte alleges the company pushed for approval of the contracts.

Accenture and Deloitte are not named as defendants in Ponte’s lawsuit. Accenture declined CNBC’s request for comment when Ponte’s suit was filed last year. Deloitte said at that time that “we are confident our contracts and services were entirely appropriate.”

CNBC also has spoken to a former Sanofi contractor, who on Tuesday of this week described how then-Sanofi executive Godleski allegedly pressured her to enter incorrect codes for purchase orders so that the companies that were the subject of the questionable contracts, Accenture and Deloitte, could start getting paid.

The ex-contractor, Jean Kazimir, said Godleski, who is named as a defendant in Ponte’s lawsuit, wanted the companies to get paid even though the contracts hadn’t been approved by Sanofi’s legal department, and despite that the purchase orders would have been for goods instead of for the services that were detailed in the contracts.

“I knew something wasn’t right,” Kazimir told CNBC. She said she had told Godleski he would need to put his request in writing, but that he never did so.

Kazimir’s account is also cited in a federal class action lawsuit filed in Manhattan by shareholders against Sanofi. That suit alleges the company and then-CEO Viehbacher misled investors and inflated Sanofi’s stock price by touting sales growth of its diabetes drugs “while omitting disclosure of the illegal practices used to achieve those sales.” Those alleged illegal practices include the same ones at the center of Ponte’s state court lawsuit.

Sanofi “funneled tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars in disguised payments to consultants Accenture and Deloitte, which according to whistleblowers served as middlemen in a scheme to induce pharmaceutical retailers and hospitals to favor Sanofi’s diabetes drugs over competing drugs from Novo Nordisk,” the Manhattan federal court suit claims. The whistleblowers are identified in the suit as Ponte and Kazimir.

Godleski’s lawyer declined to comment on Kazimir’s allegations.

Sanofi has asked a federal judge to dismiss the shareholders’ lawsuit, arguing that the plaintiffs have failed to lay out sufficient legal grounds for their action.

The Daily Beast: “Better Call Rosemarie! Meet the Lawyer Suing Christie Over Bridgegate”

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Better Call Rosemarie! Meet the Lawyer Suing Christie Over Bridgegate
Rosemary Arnold says her clients—including a doggy-daycare owner—suffered when their town was jammed with traffic.

by Olivia Nuzzi
The Daily Beast
January 16, 2014

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/16/better-call-rosemarie-meet-the-lawyer-suing-christie-over-bridgegate.html

In Fort Lee, New Jersey, perched high above the Hudson River, is a white, slightly weatherworn building. It houses the law offices of Rosemarie Arnold, advertised in bold white lettering above the doorway. At the entrance of the office driveway, a sign informs you that you are at “The Personal Injury Center.” The.

Six days ago, a group of six New Jersey residents filed a lawsuit in federal court in response to revelations that suggested at least one official in Governor Chris Christie’s administration closed lanes of the George Washington Bridge as an act of political retribution against Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich, a Democrat. Rosemarie Arnold is the civil trial attorney who is representing those (now ten) residents. They are suing Christie, the Port Authority, ex-PA officials David Wildstein and Bill Baroni, and Christie’s former deputy chief of staff, Bridget Anne Kelly.

Arnold’s website advertises her practice areas: car accidents, dog bites, workplace injuries, burn injuries, workplace discrimination, dangerous and defective products, truck accidents, construction accidents, fall-down injuries, spinal-cord injuries, and wrongful death. When we emailed, she responded to me from her iPad. Her sign off included a series of emojis: three ambulances, five bags of money, four shamrocks, and a rose.

Inside her office waiting room, which smells overwhelmingly of Italian food, a downtrodden client sits on a shiny, brown leather chair. He taps his foot and rests his head on the wall behind him, which is overflowing with thumb-tacked thank-you cards. The rest of the walls are decorated with framed press clippings, highlighting Arnold’s many high profile legal battles.

On the cover of US Weekly, with the headline “My World Was Shattered,” is an article about supermodel Christie Brinkley’s divorce. Arnold represented the young girl with whom Brinkley’s ex allegedly had an affair. The entire wall is devoted to this one case, with three other full-page clippings from the New York Post.

As I read the walls, Arnold, who sports a deep tan and dark brown hair, wizzed by, dressed down in jeans, a white tank top and a pink flannel shirt, “I’m running late, be with you in a minute!” Arnold barely looks 25, which is about how long she has owned her practice.

In front of a very large box of Advil, she began by explaining the terror that was the gridlock on the bridge. “People were screaming at each other, and cars were coming like within millimeters of each other, like trying to cut each other off and be first! It was stressful; it was anxiety producing; and it made everybody late!”

Arnold told me one of her clients was late to work and fired. She said she knew of a “newspaper delivery company that delivers The Times” who was affected, and has a client who owns a doggy daycare “right at the foot of the bridge” that couldn’t have pooches picked up or dropped off.

Arnold said her ten plaintiffs are just the ones they named, and she “expects the class to consist of over 100,000 people.” Arnold adds, “each persons’ damages need to be calculated, but I can’t imagine this case is worth less than tens of millions of dollars.”

The smoking gun text by Bridget Ann Kelly (“Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee”) is what Arnold says will win her case for her. The rest of the documents, she told me, weren’t even that important. And Arnold, a former supporter of Christie, said his gross misjudgment and mismanagement in Bridgegate has turned her. “The governor to me is a clear-cut defendant in this case. He is the captain of the ship, and he has publicly stated that this was his fault and his administration failed. He actually publicly stated that they acted, and these are important words, with ‘callous indifference,’ that’s purposeful conduct, that’s not negligence, okay? And the governor has proven to be a bully who takes steps to retaliate against those who don’t support him, so of course suing him puts people in a position where they might be subject to his wrath. I don’t fear that.”

Given Arnold’s familiarity with tabloids and television shows like Inside Edition, where she once appeared, I offer a comparison to Gloria Alred.

Arnold gives me a look.

“This is a serious law firm.”

From Politico.com: “Class-action suit filed over bridge”

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Class-action suit filed over bridge

By JOSE DELREAL
Politico.com
January 9, 2014

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/01/chris-christie-bridge-lawsuit-101991.html

A class-action complaint has been filed in federal court against top government officials connected to the George Washington Bridge scandal, the Fort Lee, N.J., attorney behind the move said Thursday.

The complaint — filed in the U.S. District Court of New Jersey by attorney Rosemarie Arnold — takes aim at key players in the controversy, naming Republican Gov. Chris Christie, his formeraide Bridget Kelly, former Port Authority officials Bill Baroni and David Wildstein, the state of New Jersey and the Port Authority as defendants.
As a class action, the exact number of members has not yet been determined, but according to the filing, it “includes any and all individuals and business owners” who were inconvenienced or hurt by the lane closures between Sept. 9 and Sept. 13. According to Arnold, the plaintiffs work or live in or near Fort Lee or New York City and are citing economic damages by the lane closures.

The complaint follows a whirlwind week for Christie, who said in a press conference Thursday that he was blindsided by a report in The Record that said senior members of his staff were connected with the lane closures on the George Washington Bridge.

Arnold, who officially filed the complaint Thursday, said she was first contacted by potential plaintiffs about suing back in September when allegations surfaced that the closures were politically motivated. At the time, however, she was hesitant to move forward because of a lack of evidence. Following the revelation that top Christie aides were connected to the closures, she now feels confident moving forward.

“At the time, I said, ‘You know, you have to be able to prove it. You can’t have these unsubstantiated allegations,’” Arnold said. “Now I think we have what we need. This is not a situation that complies with the 14th Amendment.”

Moving forward, the class listed in the complaint has to be certified by meeting certain criteria; Arnold said she is “100 percent” certain those steps will be cleared.

Arnold also stressed that her clients were not merely “inconvenienced” by the road closures.

“I have a client that suffers from panic attacks. And while she was stuck in this traffic, she started to have a panic attack. She and her husband were just trapped like rats,” Arnold said. “She walked out of the car, she threw up, and then she just wanted to leave, but she couldn’t walk home. The traffic was disastrous. And this was a deliberate attempt. This was the desired result of the political motivated closure.”

Atty: Port Washington Family Files Lawsuit After 6-Year-Old Attacked By Dog In Schoolyard (CBS)

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Atty: Port Washington Family Files Lawsuit After 6-Year-Old Attacked By Dog In Schoolyard
Doctors Unable To Reattach Boy’s Ear; Espositos Suing For $30 Million
June 4, 2012 8:11 PM

http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2012/06/04/atty-port-washington-family-suing-after-6-year-old-attacked-by-dog-in-schoolyard/

PORT WASHINGTON, N.Y. (CBSNewYork) – The parents of a 6-year-old Long Island boy who said their son was attacked by a dog on a school playground is suing the dog’s owners for $30 million.

Andrew Esposito was playing in the schoolyard at Sousa Elementary School in Port Washington when a lab mix allegedly got away from its owners as it was being walked through the playground.
The 6-year-old’s father, Ed Esposito, said his son had gone up to pet the dog when he was attacked.

“I turn over and I see my son face down in the dirt,” he told 1010 WINS’ Steve Sandberg. “My wife runs over to him and starts screaming ‘his ear, his ear! Look for his ear!'”

There are signs prohibiting dogs from entering school grounds, according to the Esposito’s attorney, Rosemarie Arnold, who added the dog is known to be “aggressive” and “vicious.”

“There are children on the block that are afraid to walk to the bus stop because this dog growls and shows teeth,” Arnold said.

The Espositos put their son’s earlobe on ice and took it to the hospital, but doctors were not able to reattach it. Arnold called the boy’s injuries “catastrophic.”

“This is an adorable, 6-year-old boy who had his earlobe chewed off,” she said.

“He’s been telling everybody that his ear’s growing back, so he thinks that his ear’s growing back. He doesn’t understand what is going on,” Ed Esposito told CBS 2’s Don Dahler.

The lawsuit claims the dog’s owners, Michael and Deborah Levine, were careless and reckless.

The Levines live in Port Washington, but a person who answered the door Monday told CBS 2’s Dahler the couple had no comment, and neither did the Levines return calls asking for their side of the story.

Meanwhile, Andrew Esposito’s father said the boy’s brothers and friends are trying to lift his spirits.

“They’ve rallied around with other kids in the community to make him feel normal,” Ed Esposito said.

Animal Control officers told the Espositos they could do nothing about the dog after the alleged attack, because this was the first time it was accused of biting someone, CBS 2’s Dahler reported.