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March 8, 2007
Atlantic Yards Loses Lease to Part of Site
The NY Times
By Andy Newman
As it moves forward on its plans for the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, the developer Forest City Ratner has represented itself as controlling nearly all the property in the 22-acre footprint of the site.
[NoLandGrab: At the October 18, 2005 public hearing, Weinstein informed the Empire State Development Corporation that the leases were illegally reassigned.]
But in a decision released yesterday, a judge in Brooklyn terminated Forest City Ratner’s long-term lease on two properties covering nearly an acre of land within the site, after finding that a tenant had sold the lease to Forest City without the owner’s permission.
Control of the properties, a six-story office building and adjacent parking lot along Pacific Street near Downtown Brooklyn, reverts to the owner, Henry Weinstein, the judge ruled.
...
Officials at Forest City Ratner declined to comment on the ruling.
It appears that Shaya Boymelgreen will be appealing the ruling:
Mr. Weinstein’s tenant, a company controlled by another major developer, Shaya Boymelgreen, had argued in court papers that Mr. Weinstein had no valid reason to deny him permission to sell his leases to two companies controlled by Forest City.
...
A lawyer for Mr. Boymelgreen’s companies, James P. Sheridan, said he would appeal the decision.
Weinstein's opinion is that Boymelgreen and Ratner knew exactly what they were doing:
Mr. Weinstein said that Forest City must have known that it did not have the right to take over the leases without his blessing. “If you’re buying a lease from somebody and you have thousand-dollar-an-hour, 800-pound gorilla lawyers retained to protect your interest,” he said, “I tend to think that they read the lease and realized that they knew that what they were doing was illegal.”
Posted by lumi at March 8, 2007 8:57 AM