Appeals court orders Miami judge to reinstate $10M verdict against Colombo’s real estate firm
A decade ago, two developers joined forces to build a high-rise condominium project next door to a luxury car dealership in Coral Gables.
But the venture between developers Masoud Shojaee and Ugo Colombo, who owns the Collection dealership, hit the skids and wound up in court, with a jury ultimately awarding a $10 million breach-of-contract judgment to Shojaee’s development firm, Shoma Group. The jury’s verdict, however, didn’t last — overturned last year by a Miami-Dade Circuit Court judge.
Now, a three-judge appeals court panel has weighed in on the long-running dispute, concluding that “we find a proper view of the evidence could sustain a verdict for Shoma.”
William Thomas, the trial judge, must reinstate the jury’s judgment, according to the Third District Court of Appeal’s order issued Wednesday. Depending on further challenges, Colombo’s development firm, CMC, faces the prospect of having to pay the original jury’s award plus interest and attorney’s fees — possibly as much as $16 million — to Shojaee’s company in the 250 Bird Road condo-project dispute.
“In Florida, where cases are properly submitted to a jury for a determination of competing facts — judges do not —and cannot, act as the seventh juror and override that finding unless no proper view of the evidence could sustain the jury’s verdict,’’ Third District Court of Appeal Judge Monica Gordo wrote in a concurring opinion to the three-judge panel’s ruling.
Colombo, a prominent luxury real estate developer who owns the Collection dealership that sells Maserati, Porsche and other luxury brands, plans to ask the full state appellate court to review the panel’s decision, said one of his attorneys, Sean Burstyn.
“Rulings have gone both ways throughout this case,” Burstyn told the Miami Herald Thursday. “The Court’s opinion initiates the next phase of the litigation.”
Shojaee and his lawyers rejoiced over the appellate court panel’s decision.
“It has been seven years of agony going through this process,’’ Shojaee, CEO of Shoma Group, said in a statement. “At this point, we simply want to recover from [Colombo’s] CMC the money we invested in a failed project and move on.”
His attorneys, Jim Robinson and Raoul Cantero with the law firm White & Case, expressed gratitude that “the appellate court recognized that the jury considered the disputed facts and resolved them in our favor and therefore reinstated the jury’s verdict in Shoma’s favor.”
In his 2016 lawsuit, Shojaee claimed Colombo broke their contract. The suit detailed a power struggle between Colombo’s CMC and Shojaee’s Shoma entities over whether the 10-story, 128-unit condo project should include retail space and a basement parking garage. The suit said that Colombo wanted to buy the shopping area and the parking spaces at a cut-rate price to bolster his business at the Collection.
When Shojaee refused his offer, the suit said that Colombo unilaterally closed down the project’s sales office and website, canceled marketing events and fired brokers who had been hired to sell condos and retail space.
Shojaee claimed lost profits and damages, saying he invested millions of dollars into the project, including $27 million that the joint venture spent on the 2.8-acre property in 2013.
