Re: MJ Estate Sues Howard Mann and business partner Henry Vaccaro
Let me answer as many questions as I can.
This latest update has came from a major filing of thousands of pages with the partial summary judgement. I only posted 2 documents - the main motion and Mann's partial deposition. The rest includes a lot of old lawsuits, a lot of contracts and so on.
If you remember during discovery phase Estate had learned that Vaccaro was still involved in these business attempts. Initially everyone thought Mann had bought everything from Vaccaro.
In his deposition Vaccaro says Mann approached to him saying that they can earn money and Mann has a deal brewing with Katherine Jackson. (Vaccaro was not involved in getting the deal with Katherine). Vaccaro agrees to the deal as he already went bankrupt and had a debt to IRS. Vaccaro says he had no intention of selling anything to Mann. The agreement is just an agreement that would allow Mann to use the assets in his projects. It's unclear for how much money as the depositions are partial but a $750,000 and $35,000 a month is mentioned. Vaccaro in his deposition says Mann owes him $550,000.
In an interesting note: Mann also got Joe and Katherine to sign some statements saying that Vaccaro is the owner of the assets and they give their support and endorsement to anything that'll be released by Vintage Pop including music masters. This is very similar to some other authorizations that we have seen from Joe and Katherine but as you know those rights are controlled by MJ Estate so Joe and Katherine cannot give any authorization.
Furthermore we learn that Katherine Jackson only gets 25% of the net profits from the book and all other assets. 75% of the profits go to Howard Mann and Henry Vaccaro.
Mann and Vaccaro form a new company in September 2009 , Vintage Pop. Vaccaro owns 51% of the company, Mann 29% and the rest for the 3rd party investors. The agreement clearly says Vaccaro's company (vintage) will continue to be the sole owner of the items. The agreement gives Vintage Pop and Mann the right to produce, distribute, monetize and exploit the items. Mann also offers to pay $1,250,000 for the rights of Vaccaro's story.
The inventory listing is a listing given to Mann by Vaccaro when they were signing their agreement. I posted the first page to show the descriptions and how Vaccaro approached to these items. All of the items mentioned have become public years and years ago. Vaccaro has 456 physical items and all of the master recordings from the Jacksons variety show (231 tapes) including songs from the other acts, multiple takes and so on.
The ownership of physical items is kinda confusing. Estate is right in saying Michael wasn't a part of the bankruptcy and the bankruptcy judge ruled that his items is not a part of it and cannot be sold. However some items are believed to be collected by the family for a restaurant (so perhaps given away by Michael to his parents) and some owned by the parents (such as if Joe hired the photographer to take pictures of the Victory tour). In some instances Katherine and Joe claimed ownership of the physical items. In some instances Vaccaro argued that ownership must be by Joseph. Regardless the bankruptcy schedules only included intellectual property of some Janet, Tito and Jermaine recordings. No IP was mentioned for Michael.
Furthermore in 2002 when the items were first being sold across entities, Michael's lawyers went to the court saying that they didn't know if there were any personal items of Michael in storage but wanted to make sure that his rights and title was not affected by any sale. Judge agreed to this saying that Michael's rights still exists and he can make any claims to any new / future owners.
So Estate's point is that regardless of who the physical items belong to, they don't include Michael's intellectual rights. Michael always had and still is the owner of those.
Mann / Vaccaro unsuccessfully argued (in dismissal request) and still argues that the 2004 MJ- Vaccaro case gives them immunity. If you don't know Vaccaro had opened a pay per view website with the photographs (now used in Katherine's book) and Michael had sued him to get it closed down and asking $100 Million. Michael had won the temporary injunction and get the website shut down but did not follow through with the lawsuit (He never sat down for his deposition) and therefore the lawsuit was dismissed and the court had ruled Michael cannot sue Vaccaro for the same claims.
Estate successfully argued and won (during dismissal hearing) that the lawsuits are different. Everything mentioned in this current lawsuit has happened in 2009 or later , including items that didn't even exist in 2004. For example Mann posted TII picture on their website on 2010 and TII was released in 2009 - so this had nothing to do with the 2004 lawsuit. The same applies to every other thing as well - Vintage pop logo (2010), Katherine's book (2010), Lithograph event (2010) , posting of Thriller 25 ( 2010 and 2008 copyrighted item), Opis None (2010).
Estate is also arguing that the 2004 trial was not heard and therefore it didn't conclude a winner or a loser. In other words 2004 lawsuit did not in any way conclude Vaccaro owns the items , it just said that as Michael did not follow it through he can't bring up the same lawsuit again. Vaccaro / Mann acts like 2004 lawsuit established their rights / ownership , Estate disagrees with this claim.
Mann:How do you have all of these paperwork? Mann's lawyer:We gave them thousands of pages Mann:He knows more about my business than I do
