CNMI Supreme Court Associate Justice Alexandro Castro\u2019s former special research attorney, Diane K. Bergeron, denied yesterday the Marianas Public Lands Authority\u2019s allegations that she had unlawfully received a cash payment from the attorneys of former Bank of Saipan receiver Randall Fennell.<\/p>\n
In a complaint filed with the Superior Court sometime last week, the MPLA had alleged that David Axelrod and his law firm Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt, which rendered services to Fennell during the latter\u2019s receivership term, made an \u201cunlawful\u201d payment of $11,977.40 to Bergeron.<\/p>\n
The MPLA alleged that the payment was aimed at soliciting documents from Bergeron, which Fennell would use in an alleged smear campaign against CNMI magistrates.<\/p>\n
Bergeron sent an e-mail to the Saipan Tribune yesterday, demanding a retraction in its Oct. 13 article that mentioned the \u201cunlawful cash payment\u201d to her as part of the MPLA\u2019s complaint against Fennell, lawyer Richard Pierce and his former law firm, White, Pierce, Mailman & Nutting, Axelrod and the Schwabe firm.<\/p>\n
\u201cMost disturbing to me is the statement that\u2026I received an \u2018unlawful\u2019 cash payment. It was neither \u2018unlawful\u2019 nor was it \u2018cash.\u2019 The term \u2018unlawful\u2019 is what most disturbs me. That is a defamatory statement and totally untrue, therefore it is grounds [sic] for a libel suit against your newspaper,\u201d Bergeron told the Saipan Tribune.<\/p>\n
Bergeron said she is not a public figure and said she was not a law clerk for Justice Castro. She said she was Castro\u2019s special research attorney during the Hillblom estate proceedings and \u201ctemporary trustee\u201d of the Hillblom Memorial Fund in 1999 and 2000.<\/p>\n
\u201cDid your reporter ever bother to check with the court system to determine when, or where, or if, such payment was ever determined to be \u2018unlawful,\u2019\u201d Bergeron asked.<\/p>\n
In the MPLA\u2019s suit against Fennell and his attorneys, the agency\u2019s attorneys stated: \u201cAxelrod and Schwabe secretly made an unlawful cash payment of $11,977.40 to CNMI Supreme Court Associate Justice Alex Castro\u2019s former special research attorney\/law clerk \u2018at receiver\u2019s request\u2019 as part of their campaign to smear CNMI judges and scheme to ruin the bank.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis illicit payment and other secret receivership work were concealed from the court apparently through a separate Schwabe trust account related to the Hillblom Estate case,\u201d the MPLA attorneys said.<\/p>\n
The MPLA attached a copy of the alleged \u201csecret bills\u201d as part of the complaint\u2019s exhibits. The Schwabe firm allegedly paid the bills in 2002.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
CNMI Supreme Court Associate Justice Alexandro Castro\u2019s former special research attorney, Diane K. Bergeron, denied yesterday the Marianas Public Lands Authority\u2019s allegations that she had unlawfully received a cash payment from the attorneys of former Bank of Saipan receiver Randall Fennell.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-94693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94693\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}