Dispute between insurance title firms continues By MAR-VIC CAGURANGAN
Security Title, Inc. is asking the Superior Court to deny the Pacific American Title’s motion for preliminary injunction, describing such action as an “attempt to squelch competition in the title insurance industry in the Commonwealth.”
Pacific Title earlier asked the court to stop Security Title from soliciting its customers away and from using the secret database allegedly pirated from the company.
“This motion was brought only to raise doubts about Security Title’s ability to do business so that Pacific Title could eliminate its competition for the Bank of Guam loan,” Security Title’s attorney Rex C. Kosack stated in the opposition pleading.
Security Title is owned by Kim Fell Anderson, a former a shareholder and officer of Pacific Title.
Pacific Title said she was fired for “disloyal and dishonest conduct.”
The attorney for Pacific Title, Gregory Koebel, has said Anderson established her own title company in 1997 immediately after she was fired. She was accused of stealing Pacific Title’s data base, leading to the filing of a theft case that was dismissed earlier this year.
Kosack said Pacific Title revived the same old “data base issue” with the intention of “protect[ing] the monopoly it has enjoyed in the title insurance for the last five years.”
Kosack said the Pacific Title’s first attempt to stop Anderson from using the database through a request for preliminary injunction filed 21 months ago was denied.
“This is the second attempt. The same arguments were made before. The same evidence was presented before. This motion, is in effect, a motion for reconsideration of the earlier ruling and it should be denied,” Kosack wrote.
Pacific Title has also accused Anderson of violating the employment contract — which was upheld by a court order — prohibiting her from “actively soliciting” Pacific Title’s customers “for the two year period following her termination.”
Kosack, however, said such restrictive covenant already expired last June 3.
Upon expiration of the restriction imposed on Anderson, Kosack said, “No longer did the Bank of Guam, and other customers, have to worry that doing business with Security Title and Anderson would someday be ruled to be illegal, or that their insurance contracts on million dollar loans might be avoided.”
