By EVA FEDDERLY
ATLANTA (CN) - The former wife of Glock firearms company founder Gaston Glock, Sr. asked a federal judge to toss her ex-husband's motion to dismiss her long-running fraud and racketeering case against him, arguing she's advanced a credible claim that he swindled her out of $500 million.
Helga Glock's 124-page motion was filed in the federal court in Atlanta on Nov. 23.
Helga Glock claims her former husband colluded with multiple parties to intentionally depress the value of her assets and cheat her out of about $500 million through a complex, decades-long racketeering scheme.
Gaston Glock, she says in the voluminous court filing, "is the primary mastermind and primary architect of the scheme to deprive [her] of her rightful interest in the assets and proceeds of their joint business efforts."
John Da Grosa Smith, Helga Glock's attorney, summed up the case, saying his client "contends that Gaston and the other Defendants stole from her and hid their misconduct for decades as part of an international conspiracy.”
Helga Glock first made these claims in court in October 2014, but her initial, 354-page lawsuit was dismissed with leave to amend after a federal judge concluded it was a "shotgun pleading."
At the time, Gaston Glock was attempting to have the case tossed for good on the grounds that critical issues in his wife's lawsuit overlapped with other litigation growing out of their 2011 divorce in Austria. However, the federal judge hearing the case found this argument unpersuasive.
Helga Glock filed an amended complaint, which her former husband sought to have dismissed, in a motion filed Aug. 23, 2016, on the grounds that Helga Glock has no standing to pursue a lawsuit against him under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act; that the Act does not permit his ex-wife to recover foreign injuries; that her RICO claims are barred by the statute of limitations; and finally, that her second complaint is no less a "shotgun pleading" than her first complaint.
"Rather than cure the numerous substantive defects in her claims, the Second Amended Complaint tries to obscure those failings in a 546-page shambles of repetitive and contradictory allegations," Gaston Glock's motion says. "Volume does not dictate viability, and the Court should dismiss Ms. Glock’s third shotgun pleading with prejudice.”
Smith said Helga Glock's rebuttal "disposes of various technical arguments that Gaston Glock Sr.’s attorneys have made in an attempt to keep Helga Glock out of court.”
“She will have her day in court, however, and will demonstrate that Gaston and his cronies have engaged in decades-long racketeering and corruption,” Smith said.
Her motion opens with a graphic intended to illustrate how her former husband and his co-defendants allegedly attempted to steal from her.
“[The graphic] shows just some of the complex ways in which she alleges that Defendants stole from her and concealed their conduct for decades, using webs of international transfers and shell companies,” Smith said.
The motion argues Helga Glock “has pleaded and shown that a coherent [racketeering] enterprise existed … Helga has alleged facts showing that she was directly targeted by Defendants in a scheme to deprive her of her property.”
John Floyd, of Bondurant Mixson & Elmore LLP in Atlanta, the attorney for the defendants, told Courthouse News he and his clients have no comment.
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