A 90-year-old woman is suing her children for allegedly diverting her share of profits from a property in Hasting-on-Hudson.
Elisa Bianchi accused her daughters of unjust enrichment in a complaint filed on Dec. 17 in Westchester Supreme Court, and is asked the court to dissolve The SEB Family LLC.
Bianchi claims that her daughters, Silvana Byrne and Patrizia Kolman, manage the business and “have diverted distributions to themselves and have attempted to extort [her] into bequeathing her membership interest to them.”
Bianchi lives in South Carolina and says she is dependent on distributions from the family business “to pay for her life’s necessities.” She has named her grandson, Gianpaolo Arpaia, as the beneficiary of her shares, to give him the means to care for himself after she dies.
SEB Family owns a building on Warburton Avenue in Hastings-on-Hudson that is leased to Overseas Autobody Inc. Elisa and Silvano Bianchi established the company as equal partners in 2005, according to the complaint. In 2006 they transferred some of their shares to their children and grandchildren, leaving themselves with 38% each.
Silvano Bianchi died in 2008 and his shares were transferred to the children and grandchildren.
Now Elisa Bianchi claims her daughters are pressuring her to sell her 38% interest at a depressed price, or to change her estate plan to bequeath her shares to them.
Her daughters allegedly withheld her distributions by claiming she had been overpaid by $1 million, for instance, then diverting her share to themselves “under the guise of rectifying” disproportionate distributions.
This past April, Arpaia tried to inspect company records. Bianchi’s daughters (Arpaia’s mother and aunt) allegedly responded that they didn’t have much but the company accountant could produce some records at Arpaia’s expense.
Arpaia eventually received bank statements, tax records, accounting data and an appraisal of the Hastings-on-Hudson property, the complaint states, but no evidence of excessive distributions to Bianchi.
Then in September his aunt allegedly told him that distributions would continue to be withheld from Bianchi until she confirmed that upon her death her shares would be transferred to her daughters.
Bianchi accused her daughters of breach of the company’s operating agreement, breach of fiduciary duty, acting in bad faith and unjust enrichment.
She is asking the court to declare that she did not receive disproportionate distributions; allow inspection of all company records; order an accounting of the company; dissolve the company; and award unspecified monetary damages.
Attempts to find contact information for Byrne and Kolman, to ask for their side of the story, were unsuccessful.
