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Re:Snopes.com prevails in tentative court ruling over financ... by chmars on Friday August 04, 2017 @03:54AM (#14927100)
Re:Snopes.com prevails in tentative court ruling over financ... by uiri on Friday August 04, 2017 @09:58AM (#14928674)
The biggest oops here is that Snopes/Bardav is an S Corp and neither Barbara's nor Proper Media's lawyers structured the deal well (or they're just totally unfamiliar with S Corps and/or tax law in general).

S Corps are treated as partnerships for tax purposes. Proper Media, an LLC, wanted to buy out Barbara's stake. LLCs are not permitted to be shareholders in an S Corp so instead of selling her stake to Proper Media, Barbara split it up among the members (i.e. the owners) of Proper Media.

If a competent lawyer had done this deal, they would have created a trust to re-consolidate Barbara's stake with the owners of Proper Media as beneficiaries and Schoentrup alone or Schoentrup and Richmond as the trustees.

I know this because I am not a lawyer, I'm not even American, and it took me only a few minutes to figure out that:

(a) trusts may own shares in an S Corp so long as the beneficiaries meet the requirements to be an S Corp shareholder (b) trusts are permitted to own shares in an S Corp for the purpose of consolidating a stake in the corporation (i.e. voting rights)

I'm not really sure that anyone can own shares in an S Corp for the benefit of an LLC since that would create a trust whose beneficiary does not meet the requirements to be a shareholder in an S Corp. So Proper Media really has no standing to sue Bardav nor Mikkelson. This should be a minority shareholders vs majority shareholders lawsuit and rather easily resolved that way.

Re:Snopes.com prevails in tentative court ruling over financ... by lightedman on Friday August 04, 2017 @11:41AM (#14929502)
Proper Media appears to be a Turkish company - that would explain why they've got no clue about American law.
Re:Snopes.com prevails in tentative court ruling over financ... by fyrstenberg on Friday August 04, 2017 @09:55AM (#14928648)
Wait... am I missing something, cause those two signatures (https://imgur.com/Zk3oRmf) are written by the same person. Just look at the first D and the writing in general, or was that suppose to be like that (TL;DR).
Re:Snopes.com prevails in tentative court ruling over financ... by chasing on Friday August 04, 2017 @10:21AM (#14928840)
That's a DocuSign thing, I believe. They have an auto-signature thing where you just push a button and they make a graphic for your name.
Re:Snopes.com prevails in tentative court ruling over financ... by Sleeep on Friday August 04, 2017 @12:17PM (#14929788)
This is correct. I "signed" several documents in that way for my mortgage and the "signatures" look identical to that.