From Authorities Accountability & Oversight
Court docket Awards GAO $225,000 in Authorized Charges Over Information Combat
Emails revealed Hollywood and different rich donors quietly financing regulation agency, with charitable basis serving as pass-through for thousands and thousands in “charitable grants”
Financing raises disclosure, potential ethics and tax questions
Late final month, the Superior Court docket for Los Angeles County awarded Authorities Accountability & Oversight $225,000 for native counsel James Okay.T. Hunter’s time spent litigating the California Public Information Act litigation, Authorities Accountability & Oversight v. Regents.
This lawsuit to acquire public entry to public data spanned simply over two years, by which the College waged a scorched-earth effort of obstruction, enlisting a group of attorneys together with a significant regulation agency’s former chair of world litigation and of its appellate observe group, for what the varsity then insisted to the court docket was actually a nothingburger of a case.
Based mostly on the a whole lot of hours GAO’s two attorneys have been compelled to spend on the matter, it appears probably that UCLA paid its personal exterior agency 5 or extra occasions that quantity. As such, GAO continues to be struggling to discern the varsity’s precise view of the significance of the matter.
A touch as to the go well with’s significance will be discovered within the substance of what GAO realized on the general public’s behalf. In April, the court docket ordered UCLA to launch most of what GAO sought, following which GAO broke the story specified by these data that Leonardo DiCaprio and no less than one inexperienced Republican donor (and fairly probably one other, influential Republican donor, Andrew Sabin) have — from the start — privately financed the wave of “local weather nuisance” litigation introduced on behalf of governmental entities by the regulation agency Sher Edling, LLP.
The thousands and thousands of {dollars} have been run by a public charity as “charitable donations” to the agency. This pre-paid financing mannequin of fits — that are nonetheless being prosecuted underneath terribly beneficiant “contingency price” agreements providing quantities usually related to corporations taking the chance of not being paid for the work — seemingly represents a revolution within the authorized business.
So, GAO is happy to announce that, though it took two years of litigation for the general public to find out about this, regardless of UCLA’s obvious willingness to do and spend something to maintain this underneath wraps, the general public now higher understands the local weather litigation business and even its genesis: Hollywood bigwigs taking tax deductions to launch a authorized tsunami.
That means one motive why the College fought and spent because it did.
These revelations may effectively have implications for a number of of the “local weather” lawsuits the Hollywood cash is definitely paying for.
As GAO and the general public additional assess the which means of this and associated info, GAO expects additional developments on this situation.
