Haas Getting Sued

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fastfordfan

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Team owner Haas being sued: A Miami-Dade lawsuit over a real estate deal gone awry could put a significant dent in NASCAR team owner Gene Haas' Sprint Cup [#14-Tony Stewart] championship spoils. Haas made the winning bid on two multimillion-dollar Golden Beach mansions at a public auction just days before NASCAR's season-ending race in Homestead. Yet the sellers of the homes, brothers Robert and Steven Fox, say Haas  through a proxy  reneged on the deal, and in turn forfeited the $1 million deposit that auction rules mandated be paid up front."He simply refused to sign the contracts," said attorney Eric Isicoff, who is representing the Foxes in the suit."In my 30 years in this business, this is the first time this has ever happened," added auctioneer (and Pompano Beach Mayor) Lamar Fisher, who handled the sale. Calls to Haas' attorneys, both in Fort Lauderdale and in California, were not returned Wednesday. A spokesman for Haas' primary business, the machine-tools company Haas Automation, declined comment.(full story at Miami Herald)(1-5-2012)
 
I'm not sure what their sueing for? Haas put up a 1 mil deposit to participate in the auction he has now declined the purchase and forfeited that deposit.
Those are the only rules of this type of auction.
 
Here's a story that goes into a little more detail on this.....

From here.

2012 is off to a rocky start for NASCAR team owner George Haas. Though 2011 ended with a championship for his team, Stewart-Haas Racing, Haas is facing a lawsuit to start 2012. In late 2011, he had bid during an auction of two beach houses in Golden Bay, Florida. As part of the requirements of bidding, for each house a bidder would be trying for, the bidder must submit a $500,000 deposit. If the bidder is unsuccessful, the money is returned. Haas bid $12.4 million for both houses and he won. Later he attempted to back out. While the sellers were willing to let him out of the contract, they wanted to keep the deposit. Haas has not allowed the money to be released and so the sellers are suing to get a judgment that the deposit is rightfully theirs.

Stewart-Haas Racing had a great 2011 season. Driver Tony Stewart, who is also a partial owner of the team, took the championship for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series. Oddly enough, Stewart clinched the championship with a good performance at Homestead-Miami Speedway in the last race of the season. Though he shortly after fired crew chief Darian Grubb in favor of Steve Addington, the team has high hopes coming off of the successful season. Grubb was only briefly out of a job and was soon snatched up by Joe Gibbs Racing to lead Denny Hamlin's team.

It is not surprising that Haas would not want to just sign over the money. If the contract says that he forfeits the deposit after backing out and there are no circumstances to void the contract, he will be out $1 million. For a championship winning team owner, that is likely not as bad as it would be for most other people. Still, it is a lot of money and it will inevitably lead to speculation as to why he would make the bid only to risk that much money by backing out. With the bad start to 2012 for Haas personally, hopefully this does not indicate a sign of things to come for the NASCAR team he owns.
Click to expand...
 
Oh so the auction house mistakenly returned Haas's bidding deposit and now the seller is wanting it, gotcha.

Maybe the seller should be sueing the auction house?
 
Apparently, Rich people can be pretty stupid. Maybe he was just scratching his armpit and ended up with 2 mansions he doesn't want.
 
Only one side of the story, gotta be more to it than that. What did Haas learn about the houses after the auction? Course he DID bid and he'll likely have to pay up.
 
Haas is like one of those bad guys from the 80's Miami Vice show, I can see Crockett knocking on his door right now saying "Gene, open up Gene, you know why we're here"
 
Rich guys do odd stuff like this all the time (I'm not defending him, don't have all the info and frankly don't care). Bottom line it's not going to have any effect on Tony's season next year.
 
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