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It turns out Marissa Mayer’s not the only one with good reason to dislike hedge-fund manager Jason Ader.
Seven years after Ader’s SpringOwl Asset Management helped end Mayer’s reign of error at Yahoo! (and Yahoo’s status as an independent company, to boot), he’s the one accused of running things into the ground. Last year, an Austrian billionaire sued Ader over a failed deal to buy the Philippines’ largest casino. Harald McPike says Ader frisked him for $25 million; his lawsuit alleges that Ader struck a side deal to sell most of Ader’s stake in the casino to investor Alex Eiseman for far less than McPike ponied up. Meanwhile, Eiseman was also advising another potential bidder for the casino—disgraced slugger Alex Rodriguez—a conflict of interest that did not go unnoticed by the Delaware judge who scotched the SPAC merger deal, and Ader was allegedly spending McPike’s money on “his own personal purposes.”
Nor is McPike the only SpringOwl investor irate with Ader: Others, frustrated by the “BS responses,” “multiple accusations of fraud” and inability to get their money back, are mulling a class-action against Ader, according to the New York Post. And among those irate investors, according to McPike, is Ader’s own mother, Pamela, who the lawsuit says last year hired lawyers to try to get her $16 million sunk into SpringOwl back.
That’s not the only issue the recently-widowed, 81-year-old Ader has with her boy, either! Around the time he was helping push Yahoo! into Verizon’s arms—a deal on which he should have roughly doubled his money—he was already hard-up for cash, taking out a $13 million mortgage on his parents’ East 73rd Street townhouse. It didn’t help, according to mom’s lawsuit against Jason.
Pamela Ader’s lawyers claim her 56-year-old son failed to keep up with payments on the massive loan, leaving his father’s estate on the hook for the crippling principal as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest and unpaid taxes…. According to the explosive lawsuit, Ader — a sometime CNBC contributor who is also known for investing in the casino industry — kept mum about the missed mortgage payments.
His mother only found out when lender Bank of America got in touch, filings show.
Pamela’s husband and Jason’s father, Richard, died a year ago. You’d have thought this might have eased Jason’s money woes a touch, given that his dad founded an $18 billion real-estate investment shop. Then again, Jason was listed after his estranged wife among Richard’s survivors on the Times obit, so maybe not.
Anyway, he’s no more interested in just getting rid of the problem than he is in paying the $75,000 a month due on the mortgage.
“During one call, Jason’s counsel claimed that Jason was tapped out’ and was unable to cure such defaults, and the parties’ counsel discussed taking steps to promptly sell the property,” the documents state.
Pamela’s legal eagles drew up a deal to offload the posh pad on East 73rd Street, according to court papers. “Jason, however, became evasive and refused to execute the agreement,” the filing states….
“It feels like I invested into the world’s worst hedge fund with the world’s worst son,” the frustrated investor added.
And maybe also the world’s worst husband and father:
A New York County Supreme Court ruling on June 6 last year found that the under-fire hedge funder was refusing to pay agreed child support.
“Despite the terms of the parties’ prenuptial agreement and several court orders, the father continually interfered with the children’s third-party providers, such as tutors, by refusing to timely pay their fees or refusing to pay them at all,” the ruling said.
Hedge fund mogul who helped topple Marissa Mayer sued by own mom for $13M: ‘World’s worst son’ [N.Y. Post]
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