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Re: Manhattan Club Lawsuit (by Robert B.):

So let me get this straight. I want to be sure I’m not missing something about this Manhattan Club settlement. Or maybe what has been published is a joke.

Thousands of us have been cheated and scammed for years by an unscrupulous band of crooks lead by Ian Bruce Eichner, and he and his cronies get to walk away SCOTT FREE by paying a token restitution. And the AG agrees that the restitution only will be paid to owners who, despite being defrauded for years by TMC operation, continued to pay maintenance fees to the criminal enterprise. And we certainly don’t want paying that restitution to be too burdensome for the crooks, so they get to spread out its payment over 3 years. I purchased a timeshare interest in TMC in 2005 for $32,000 based on a sales presentation during which just about every claim or promise made by the sales rep was false, misleading, or an outright lie, and the NY Attorney General’s undercover investigators have evidence of it all recorded on video.

Despite paying me fees for 10 years, I have been routinely cheated out of the use of my timeshare while the Eichner family and a small circle of TMC insiders have enriched themselves at my expense. Again, based on evidence gathered by the AG, we have learned that, for years, Eichner has been personally skimming over 6 million dollars a year from TMC through a shell management company called Urban. This company had no employees and provided no services to the operation of the timeshare property, yet our timeshare corporation was paying them $6 million a year!

TMC’s obligation to me was to make 7 days per year available to me to stay at TMC. Instead of making those days reasonably available, TMC engaged in an organized scheme to routinely tell me, and any other timeshare owner who called to make a reservation that the desired days were not available; while at the same time, TMC was selling the same rooms for the same dates to the general public on the Internet. Can anyone say, “RICO”? Anyone who hasn’t done so already should read the NY Attorney General's July, 2015 court filing, which itemizes a remarkable list of allegations of civil and criminal conduct on the part of The Manhattan Club. Here is the link to that 2015 AG court filing: You may have to paste it into your browser.

https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/fbem/DocumentDisplayServlet?documentId=arMAhc2Z8epneiTXUbb_PLUS_yQ==&system=prod

After you read that, ask yourself if the settlement reached by the AG has really provided anyone justice.

Bob Biello