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Fund board seeks sanction vs Jorgensen
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Posted on Jul 05 2011
The NMI Retirement Fund’s board of trustees and its three board members are asking the federal court to sanction attorney Bruce Jorgensen for filing a motion that allegedly contained improper allegations or is frivolous.
The Fund’s board and board members Pedro Q. Dela Cruz, Sixto K. Igisomar, and Adelina C. Roberto wants the U.S. District Court for the NMI to remove Jorgensen’s offending motion.
The defendants, through counsel Braddock J. Huesman, also asked the court to order Jorgensen to apologize and admit that the allegations were unsupported.
They also asked the court to fine Jorgensen in an amount enough to deter him from filing similar papers, and to administer any nonmonetary sanction it sees fit.
Instead of litigating the lawsuit in the Ninth Circuit or filing a paper citing to case law or discussing jurisdiction, Huesman said that Jorgensen filed a paper that made unsupported allegations, failed to discuss the appeal, and filed to discuss the adverse case law in this matter.
“This is unacceptable conduct for a reasonable man, who is a competent attorney admitted to practice before this court,” Huesman said.
Jorgensen, on behalf of his clients—two unnamed CNMI government employees—are suing Gov. Benigno Fitial and the Fund over alleged non-payment of their retirement benefits.
The Fund has a pending appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit over the federal court’s order that denied the Fund’s motion to dismiss Jorgensen’s lawsuit.
Despite the pending appeal, Huesman said the unnamed plaintiffs, through Jorgensen, filed on May 18, 2011, a request for status conference and motion to lift stay.
Huesman said the plaintiffs made no mention of the denial of the plaintiffs’ motion to dismiss the appeal from the Ninth Circuit.
Additionally, Huesman said, the plaintiffs seek the same requests they have sought since the appeal started.
Huesman said Jorgensen alleges in the motion that he (Huesman) has a conflict of interest, but did so with no citation to the applicable conflict rules or actual evidence of conflict.
