A Clark County judge imposed a partial stay in a battle between Las Vegas’ two daily newspapers, citing serious concerns over whether a state court had jurisdiction in several matters also being litigated in federal courts.
Judge Timothy Williams issued the pause of one disputed matter, pending a ruling from the federal court over whether it will hear a case filed by the Las Vegas Sun against the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
In late September, the R-J announced its plans to try to dissolve the joint operating agreement under which the R-J and the Sun have operated since 1989 and which was amended in 2005. The R-J filed this action as a counterclaim to a pending state court action by the Sun accusing the R-J of changing its front page and diminishing the Sun’s presence on it in a manner not allowed under the contract.
When the R-J announced its plans, the Sun went to federal court and filed suit saying this effort and other R-J actions constituted an attempt to create an illegal monopoly in Clark County.
In Wednesday’s hearing, Williams expressed serious concerns — echoed by the Sun attorneys — about whether a state court has jurisdiction over antitrust issues raised by the R-J’s counterclaim, while reserving final judgment.
“I’m going to take a cautious approach,” Williams said at the end of a two-hour hearing. “I’m not going to rule for dismissal outright, but I’m going to stay this matter pending resolution to the Sun’s action in federal court.”
Williams stressed he wasn’t ruling that his court did not have jurisdiction in the matter, just that he wanted to see what happened in federal court. No date for hearing the case in federal court has been set.
“We have the utmost respect for the court, though we respectfully disagree with the decision,” said Benjamin Lipman, general counsel for the R-J. “It is a shame the Sun continues to waste the parties’ and court’s time and money in ongoing efforts to avoid its day of reckoning for failing to live up to the promises it made and continues to fight against allowing our justice system to rule on the Review-Journal’s claims.”
The Sun filed a lawsuit against Sheldon Adelson and the ownership group of the R-J in September in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas, alleging Adelson is trying to stop the Sun from publishing in order to silence an alternative editorial voice in Las Vegas.
The goal, as alleged by the Sun, is for Adelson — a billionaire casino owner and megadonor to the Republican Party — to muffle his local media critics, monopolize the local newspaper industry and squelch dissent to his newspaper’s right-leaning editorial views.
In federal court, the Sun seeks to force the R-J to cease its “abusive, unlawful and anticompetitive practices,” and a judgment ordering the R-J’s owners to either divest themselves of the newspaper or to at least turn over the newspaper’s non-editorial business operations to an independent agency or trustee.
“Today was a very important day,” Sun attorney James Pisanelli said. “While the court reserved its ruling on whether to dismiss the R-J’s counterclaims, which are designed to put the Sun out of business, the court expressed serious concerns over whether it had subject matter jurisdiction over those claims due to the preemptive effect of the Newspaper Preservation Act (NPA) and federal antitrust laws.”
The JOA structure was created under the act, which was approved by Congress and signed into law in the 1970s. The legislation provides limited antitrust protection for newspapers to combine business functions while remaining editorially independent.
The Sun and the Review-Journal have several distinct matters before Williams that will remain in state court. He promised a pre-Thanksgiving ruling on one of them, whether to affirm an arbitration award that found the Adelson-owned R-J engaged in improper accounting practices that deprived the Sun of profit payments.
Sun lawyers have asked Williams to affirm most of what the arbitrator ruled. R-J attorneys have argued to keep the arbitrator’s findings out of public view.
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A dispute between two prominent Las Vegas marijuana business owners has reached the courts, with the proprietor of Essence dispensaries accusing a former owner with The Apothecary Shoppe of embarking on a jealous campaign of slander aimed to do him more than $1 million in damage.
Armen Yemenidjian, a former casino executive who’s affiliated with three dispensaries, won another eight dispensary licenses last year and is part of a company that was recently acquired for $290 million, filed a lawsuit in Clark County Nov. 4 against Dr. Nick Spirtos. Yemenidjian alleges that Spirtos has accused him of criminal activity to other people, including lobbyist and former Assembly Speaker John Oceguera during an encounter at Gov. Steve Sisolak’s inaugural ball.
“Spirtos, in concert with others, undertook a scheme to slander Mr. Yemenidjian, because he has proven to be one of the most successful businessmen in the legal cannabis business,” the complaint says. “Rather than own his failures, Spirtos has resorted to smearing and spreading lies against others to harm their existing and future business opportunities.”
Spirtos, a gynecologic oncologist, was formerly affiliated with The Apothecary Shoppe, which has one dispensary in Southern Nevada but fell short in its attempt to win three other licenses in 2018. Reached by phone on Friday, Spirtos said he was traveling overseas and referred questions to his lawyer, who did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment on Friday and Monday.
The suit alleges that Spirtos made about a dozen private phone calls to George Kelesis, a member of the Nevada Tax Commission, to discuss undoing the result of the licensing round. Spirtos and Kelesis attend the same Greek church and are godparents to each others’ children, the suit says, but Kelesis spearheaded criticism of the state’s licensing process as a commissioner without disclosing the relationship.
Yemenidjian accuses Spirtos of talking to Oceguera at Sisolak’s inaugural ball this year and accusing Yemenidjian of “outright corruption” and criminal activity. He also said Spirtos surreptitiously recorded a meeting with Nevada Department of Taxation officials as part of an attempt to dupe the state employees in a meeting they had set up to review Spirtos’ application scores with him.
“Spirtos also hoped and planned that his slander would interfere with the State of Nevada’s licensing process for recreational marijuana since he did not obtain a license,” the complaint says. “Spirtos and those acting in concert with him have simply decided that maintaining their own market share and delaying competition in the marketplace is preferable.”
Yemendijian’s lawyer, Todd Bice, said that in a deposition for one of the lawsuits challenging the licensing process, and then when personally confronted by Yemenidjian, Spirtos denied making such comments and said he didn’t have a factual basis for making such allegations.
Bice said that to “insinuate that they were only chosen because of some nefarious criminal activity is just outrageous” in light of Essence scoring highly in licensing proceedings in different years in Nevada, and also in jurisdictions in California with different scorers. Bice also said the allegations could get published and then would be brought up in licensing reviews going forward.
“He’s just got to fight back against this. He can’t allow that kind of stuff to stand. It will then be weaponized … against him in the future,” Bice said in an interview.
The suit is the latest stemming from a contentious round of marijuana business licensing, in which more than 400 applications were submitted and 61 licenses awarded to 17 different companies including Essence. Many dispensary owners who did not win have sued the state, including Spirtos’ former company, whose suit alleges the state engaged in “rampant illegality and corruption.”
Spirtos has been a vehement critic of the licensing process, testifying to the Tax Commission that he believes that levels of corruption similar to that in the Nixon White House took place. The suit brought by his former company also alleges that Yemenidjian offered a job to the state’s former top marijuana regulator, Jorge Pupo.
Bice said there was no job offer, just a “passing reference,” and that Yemenidjian’s conversations with Pupo have been “wildly mischaracterized.”
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RENO — Nevada’s attempt to force the federal government to remove half a metric ton of weapons-grade plutonium can move forward, a federal judge in Reno ruled Monday.
The nine-page decision from U.S. District Judge Miranda Du means Nevada will be allowed to file an amended lawsuit asking the court to require the U.S. Energy Department to remove the plutonium that was secretly shipped into the state last year.
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals shot down Nevada’s initial appeal because the complaint only asked to block the shipment of plutonium to Nevada and did not request that it be removed. When the state filed the first lawsuit against the Energy Department in 2018, it was not yet known that the nuclear material had already been shipped to the Nevada National Security Site, a federal facility located roughly 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The federal government did not disclose that information until this year.
A federal judge in South Carolina last year ordered the Energy Department to remove one metric ton of weapons-grade plutonium from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. A half-ton was shipped to Nevada last fall, and the Energy Department announced in August that another half-ton had been shipped to either Texas or New Mexico.
In April, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., said she had struck a deal with Energy Secretary Rick Perry to remove the plutonium from Nevada starting in 2021, and that no additional plutonium would be sent to the Silver State.
A claim by the Las Vegas Review-Journal that the Las Vegas Sun has breached a decades-old Joint Operating Agreement can move forward in Clark County District Court, a judge ruled Wednesday.
But the prospects of the claim may depend significantly on another legal matter — a lawsuit filed this week in federal court by the Sun against the R-J.
Clark County District Judge Timothy Williams heard arguments from the legal teams for both newspapers before ruling that the R-J could proceed with its claim that the Sun — which is delivered inside the R-J — is an inferior product and that the JOA, which is set to expire in 2040, should be terminated.
Wednesday’s hearing, which lasted for about an hour at the Regional Justice Center, came a day after the Sun filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging any attempt by the R-J to end the JOA prematurely would be a violation of antitrust laws.
Much of Sun attorney James Pisanelli’s argument before Williams centered on what he said was the need for the matter to be heard in federal court as opposed to state court.
“The Review-Journal’s attempt to terminate this JOA must be scrutinized by the only court that has jurisdiction to do antitrust scrutiny, which is the federal court,” Pisanelli said. “Federal court has exclusive jurisdiction over antitrust laws.”
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The Las Vegas Sun is accusing billionaire Sheldon Adelson of committing a “modern-day smashing of the printing presses” through his purchase of rival newspaper The Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Sheldon, 86, is the owner and chairman of the Las Vegas Sands, the world’s largest casino operator. The Sun’s strongly worded Sept. 24 antitrust complaint accuses Sheldon of purchasing the Review-Journal to begin “a systematic silencing of all his local media critics.”
The Review-Journal recently filed a lawsuit against the Sun in a Nevada state court in what the Sun says is a “baseless and unlawful” claim to end a joint operating agreement between the two newspapers. The JOA is the result of a federal law that “provides a limited antitrust exemption for newspapers to combine production, marketing, distribution, and sales, so long as their editorial and reportorial functions are maintained separate and independent,” the complaint said.
The move by the Review-Journal to end the JOA violates federal antitrust law, the complaint filed Sept. 24 by the Sun in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada said.
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