Arent Fox files lawsuit in Medley Centre project

New York City law firm Arent Fox LLP has filed suit against Japanese companies Nomura Credit & Capital Inc. and NCCMI Inc., claiming they reneged on contractual obligations and lending commitments to a public-private project in Monroe County that included the Medley Centre Mall.

The lawsuit was filed Friday in Monroe County Supreme Court on behalf of Bersin Properties LLC, which was developing a mixed-use center of hotels, apartments, entertainment, retail and office space, designed to be a tourism destination, resulting in thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in tax, business and tourism revenue.

“Turning its back on its commercial real estate loans — particularly in the U.S. — was not a legitimate way for Nomura to recover from the financial crisis or its own financial predicament,” said Howard Graff, lead counsel along with former state Supreme Court Judge John Cherundolo. “Nor was it a legitimate way to rehabilitate its financial statements — suffering from an overstatement of assets, artificially inflated by $7.2 billion.”

They seek to hold Nomura responsible for its alleged failure to honor lender obligations to their client and to allow Bersin Properties to pursue the project.

In the filing, Bersin argued that Nomura’s contractual breaches were animated by false representations of its resources and ability to finance the project: Nomura is “walking away from their legal obligations and turning their back on the plaintiff and a public-private partnership that was to be a cornerstone of their economic future.”

Graff, who was lead counsel in a case involving a similar development project in Syracuse (Destiny and the Carousel Center), and Judge Cherundolo are joined by Courtney E. Topic and James Westerlind of Arent Fox and Gregory D. Faucher of Whitman Osterman & Hanna LLP.