Board members laid the blame for the increase on the district’s battle with Sandpebble Builders over an $80 million construction project that predates almost everyone on the School Board and that both sides’ attorneys have said may now go to trial.

“This kills me,” said Jackie Lowey, a board member. “We had talked about this last week in executive session. … Those of us who inherited this train wreck. To say it was handled poorly is like saying it was a bad windstorm in Japan.”

“We have tried to settle,” she added. “We are being bled to death by a contractor at the expense of our children.”

“We have tried in every way possible to settle,” agreed School Board President Dr. Laura Anker.

Patricia Hope, another board member, asked if they were referring to a 133-percent increase in a budget line item for legal matters: from $150,000 in 2011-12 to $350,000 in 2012-13.

“That’s what Pinks is anticipating if we don’t settle,” Ms. Lowey answered, referring to the district’s legal counsel, Pinks, Arbeit and Nemeth of Hauppauge.

“We are preparing to release a statement,” said Alison Anderson, another board member. Board members did not indicate what it would say or when it might be expected, however.

“This is unfortunate, because it’s totally out of our hands,” Liz Pucci, another board member, commented.

Sandpebble sued the school district in 2006 for $3.75 million after the construction contract, whose scope had been greatly expanded, was awarded to another builder. The district has spent at least $2.3 million in legal fees on suits and countersuits so far, and the School Board replaced the original attorneys last year as a cost-saving measure.

Indianapolis financier Tim Durham, including his ex-wife, Joan SerVaas.

Since early 2010, trustee Brian Bash has been trying to recover funds for investors of Ohio-based Fair Finance, which was

led by Durham until his financial empire collapsed in late 2009. Investors lost more than $200 million when the company

failed.

Besides SerVaas, the newest suits target B.J. Durham, SerVaas’ biological son who was adopted by Durham, and the

financier’s sister, Courtney Durham.

They are among a long list of Durham’s friends and business associates, as well as companies and charities, that records

say received loans or transfers from the indicted executive or his business in recent years. Bash contends the payments

were fraudulent transfers that must be repaid because they were made when Durham and his companies were insolvent.

The suit against Joan SerVaas alleges that she accepted money transfers from Tim Durham totaling at least $226,000. B.J.

Durham is accused of accepting $59,107 in transfers from Tim Durham, according to the suit.

Another complaint alleges that Courtney Durham accepted $64,700 in money transfers from her brother.

The suits against the three, filed this month, follow a lawsuit against Michael Durham, Durham’s stepson from his marriage

to SerVaas. Bash accuses Michael Durham of accepting $49,712 in transfers from Tim Durham.

And late last month, Bash sued Durham’s mother, Mitza Durham of Seymour, accusing her of receiving 58 checks or wire

transfers totaling $831,000 from Durham from February 2006 through November 2009.

So far in February, Bash has filed more than 40 lawsuits against notable defendants such as rapper Ludacris, former Playboy

playmate Jamie Ferrell and former O.J. Simpson confidant Kato Kaelin.

Other defendants include former IndyCar team Playa del Racing Inc., Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site Inc. and Henri

Najem, who owns the Bella Vita restaurants downtown and on Geist Reservoir. His brother Anthony Najem, who co-founded

Fishers-based construction firm Meyer Najem Corp., also is a defendant.

The amounts the latest defendants are accused of receiving from Durham are relatively small compared with the $1.2 billion

Bash is seeking from Fair’s lenders—Rhode Island-based Textron Financial Corp. and New York-based Fortress Credit Corp.

That suit, filed Feb. 7, charges the companies turned a blind eye to Durham’s fraudulent activities because they were

making millions of dollars on their lending relationship and held first liens on the only Fair assets with real value.

It accuses the two companies, which have billions in assets, of aiding and abetting theft, fraud and insiders’ breaches of

fiduciary duty.

The suits are part of Bash’s continuing quest to recover some of the more than $200 million that Fair owes more than 5,000

Ohio investors who purchased unsecured notes from the company.

Bash alleges Durham looted Fair after buying it in 2002, stripping the business of the financial wherewithal to repay the

investors.

Durham and two business partners, James Cochran and Ricky D. Snow, were arrested in March after being indicted on 12 felony

counts, including conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud. They deny wrongdoing.
More Fair suits target Durham family members

the Block Arcade banned them for life after one of last year’s ”city raids” – a classic MIS operation, during which 20

besuited blokes emerged from the camouflage of the morning crowds of businessmen and broke into their satiric anthem Let me

through, let me through/I’ve got very important things to do.

The choir has also alarmed security guards at various city stations by appearing on escalators and platforms to sing, in

glorious four-part harmony, their unofficial Metro hymn of mourning to late and cancelled trains – with lines such as ”Let

us remember the 10.53 from Epping which never made it through.”

The previous Christmas, security guards at Myer were ready to call the police when the group began serenading parcel-laden

shoppers with their anti-consumerism anthem Buy more stuff.

Men In Suits are now regularly invited to ”invade” corporate charity functions, while sometimes they are merely asked to

just get up on stage and sing. Next month they will perform at the Melbourne a Cappella festival and at the Yackandandah

Folk Festival, while this Thursday night they will be at the Melbourne Town Hall for the Victorian Women’s Trust’s ”Be The

Hero! Storming Against Violence” forum on violence against women.

Women’s Trust executive director Mary Crooks wanted the choir because she loves the line from their song Just Because that

goes ”Just because I’m trapped inside a suit/Doesn’t mean that I don’t yearn to play the lute”.

”To me it fits the idea of the real man emerging and taking a leadership role in the prevention of violence against

women,” she says.

The Men in Suits’ repertoire also contains non-political but musically complex folk songs from Georgia in the Caucasus,

while the choir also performs Leonard Cohen’s romantic ballad Dance Me to the End of Love – during which the singers

descend into the audience and invite women to dance. Their carefully pre-arranged ”intervention” at the welcome party for

the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists’ international forensic psychiatry conference in 2009

included this song, and scenes of the suits waltzing with female psychiatrists are on the medical organisation’s website.

Yet performing was the last thing on the mind of the inaugural choristers, who got together in early 2006, under the name

”Blokes Night Out”. Then, says property industry consultant and long-time member Bede Dempsey, 58, they were just a group

of middle-aged men doing the musical equivalent of ”going to our shed” with a series of guest conductors giving them

singing workshops.

One of these guests, Stephen Taberner, stayed on to lead them.

”I made that series of workshops last five years,” says Taberner, 50, instigator of many political ”flash mob” choir

events – including a 2007 election series in which singers popped up around the city carolling ”Vote the bastards out”.

He is also the founder of the cult choir Spooky Men’s Chorale, which completed a highly successful fourth UK tour last

year.

Now a full-time conductor of four different choirs, Taberner spent the 1990s living a double life – musician by night,

trapped in a suit by day. Accordingly, the satirical suit-themed songs he has written for Men In Suits also evoke sympathy

for the plight of men caught by financial necessity in what he calls the ”very dead, very non-celebratory” corporate

world.

The conductor is now ready to add to the MIS repertoire.

”On a bad day, Men in Suits [age range: 30-something to 70] act like a gang of 14-year schoolboys. So I have been thinking

of doing some ‘teen angst’ songs – songs that will express the fact that a lot of men are still just boys.”

Singing suits create a stir

The exhibition components arrived at the Witte Museum in seven tractor-trailers – one for the artifacts alone. That doesn’t

include transport for the live critters – a land iguana and two South American horned frogs – that will take up residence

in the show for its duration.

The exhibit’s size suits the story, said Bryan Bayles, curator of anthropology for the Witte, where the exhibit opens

Saturday.

“It’s a pretty epic story,” Bayles said. “It’s a big exhibit, and it really traces how this idea took shape.”

The idea is evolution, Charles Darwin’s theory that organisms change over time through the process of natural selection.

The show was pulled together by the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It debuted there about two years ago

and has since toured museums around the world. The Witte is the first Texas institution to get it.

“Especially when the exhibition launched, there was such a struggle in this country over natural selection and evolution,”

said Lauri Halderman, senior director of exhibitions for the New York museum. “We wanted visitors to understand that

natural selection is the scientific explanation for how life evolved. And it’s helpful to see Darwin’s thinking and how

Darwin spent so long making sure that he was right, and thinking hard about examples that might disprove his theory. He

wanted to look into every possible angle, every avenue, to make sure he was on the right track.

“We wanted people to understand the depth of Darwin’s thinking, and that, in the intervening decades, while we have many

additional insights now, nothing fundamentally changes Darwin’s theory.”

The exhibit begins with a look at the prevailing theories before Darwin introduced his ideas. It goes on to explore his

boyhood curiosity, his life-changing time as a naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle and the development of the theory of

evolution. It also deals with his concerns about how that theory would be received.

“(Darwin) knew that it would be very upsetting to people because it’s basically going against the idea that there was a

divine creator, rather than (the idea) that species could be created through a natural process,” Bayles said. “Before

Darwin, largely the notion was that animals and species were created by God, as is, and they did not change over time.

Things were sort of created in one fell swoop, and that was that.”

There’s a lot of attention-getting stuff in the exhibit, including life-size replicas of some of the animals Darwin ran

across on the Galapagos Islands and a detail-rich reproduction of his study. But the things that might have the most impact

are the journals – small, bound notebooks filled with cramped handwriting detailing his observations. One page holds what

is thought to be his first sketch of the tree of life: a simple trunk with a few branches jutting out, illustrating

relationships between groups of organisms. It’s drawn beneath the words “I think.”

The notebooks have proved popular with people who have seen the exhibit in other cities, Halderman said.

“They can see his mind at work and see his handwriting and get a sense of him as a person,” she said.
Darwin exhibit’s size suits scope of his epic story

series of court actions arising from the turmoil that has disrupted GM’s Canadian sales network since its parent company

went into bankruptcy protection in 2009.

The 26 Buick GMC dealers – battered by the cancellation of their Pontiac franchises when General Motors Corp. phased out

the brand in 2009 – want the Ontario Superior Court to order GM Canada to allow them to sell Chevrolet vehicles.

It’s the third lawsuit filed by large groups of GM Canada dealers and demonstrates that the restructuring of the auto

maker during the 2008-09 auto crisis and recession is still creating fallout more than three years later as the company

struggles to regain its traction in Canada.

While GM has scaled back to four brands, its Canadian network is still a hodge-podge of about 460 dealerships that includes

stores offering all four of Chevrolet, Buick, GMC and Cadillac vehicles, outlets offering Chevrolet only and about 40 that

sell just Buick and GMC vehicles. The plan appears to involve a model in which all four brands will be under one roof,

similar to what many of GM’s competitors do, such as Ford Motor Co. of Canada Ltd. with its Ford-Lincoln outlets.

If GM loses this case, it will be faced with the issue of determining how to close more dealerships because many of the

Buick GMC outlets are in close proximity to existing Chevrolet dealerships and it might have to provide financial

assistance to dealers to further rationalize its network.

“I think this claim reflects one of the last significant legacy issues of the restructuring and it reflects the fact that

although GM has successfully restructured, for a significant portion of its dealers they have been denied the opportunity

to participate in that restructuring,” said Toronto lawyer Jonathan Lisus, who represents the Buick GMC dealers.

The Buick GMC dealers, all but two of which were kept on by GM Canada after it terminated about one-third of its network of

more than 700 outlets in May, 2009, are located from British Columbia to Newfoundland. A previous lawsuit by dealers, also

represented by Mr. Lisus, that were terminated then but did not sign wind-down agreements was settled before going to

trial, with many of the 19 dealers involved in that case winning reinstatement.

A third group of dealers that were terminated and did sign wind-down agreements are now involved in a class-action lawsuit

against GM Canada that has been certified and is making its way through the courts. There have been other individual suits

and some cases in which dealers sued each other over sales territory and brand issues.

GM Canada spokeswoman Faye Roberts said it is company policy not to comment on matters before the courts.

The new case centres on the decision by GM Canada’s parent in Detroit to eliminate Pontiac, one of four brands it shed as

part of a plan to convince the U.S., Canadian and Ontario governments to finance a bailout worth more than $60-billion.

Pontiac generated the majority of vehicle sales for what were then Pontiac-Buick-GMC dealers. MacDonald Pontiac Buick GMC

Cadillac Ltd. in Moncton, N.B., for example, relied on Pontiac for 89 per cent of its new vehicle sales. Without the

Pontiac line, Buick GMC dealers are at a disadvantage against Chevrolet, says the statement of claim filed in the lawsuit.

GM produces only trucks and utility vehicles for its GMC line and no passenger cars. Buick is an upscale brand that has no

small cars that compete with Chevrolet offerings, the claim says, unlike the days before the restructuring when Pontiac and

Chevrolet offered vehicles in most passenger car segments.

“The Buick line does not have a small, fuel-efficient, affordable entry-level vehicle,” the dealers’ statement of claim

says. “The ability to offer customers small, fuel-efficient, entry-level and affordably priced cars is essential to a

dealer’s success in light of consumer preference, rising gasoline prices and increasing environmental awareness.”

Buick has begun offering its first compact car, the Verano, but it’s aimed at more upscale buyers than the Chevrolet

Cruze, which is also a compact.

Mark Reuss, president of General Motors North America, was asked by Canadian reporters in Detroit last month if the

acrimonious relations between the company and its dealers contributed to GM Canada’s 2 per cent sales decline last year in

an overall market that rose 2 per cent.

“I’m not sure it’s value added for me to go do some sort of analysis on that,” Mr. Reuss said. “I’d rather move

forward with it. That’s what we did [in the United States.] Let’s get on with it.”

Dealers launch new suit against GM

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