A Westchester businessman in a regional Shell gas stations venture that has been entangled for the past year in heated personal disputes and lawsuits between managing partners recently proposed buyout options to his rivals to settle their differences.
At the same time, Sammy El Jamal, whose partners seek to oust him from their service-station businesses in New York and Connecticut, said in private emails that he has changed attorneys and has “continued stalling in the courts” to “just buy time” to reach an outcome that will redeem his reputation and keep him in the gasoline industry.
El Jamal”™s rambling emails — variously threatening, cajoling, boasting, aggrieved, peace-tendering and cryptic in their references to “investigations” of parties to the lawsuits and their family members and associates — were presented as exhibits in state Supreme Court this month by attorneys for his legal rivals, Leon Silverman and James A. Weil, managing members with El Jamal of NY Fuel Distributors L.L.C. and affiliated companies. Silverman is chairman of Silverman Realty Group Inc. in White Plains. Weil is a Scarsdale investor and the financial chief of the Shell business whom El Jamal is separately suing for libel and slander.
El Jamal this month told his partners he is willing “to sever ties without further embarrassment” and “stop the unnecessary spending of legal fees” for an $8.39 million cash buyout. According to court documents, he invested about $2 million in the $43.3 million deal in 2010 to acquire 43 Shell service-station properties or leases in Westchester, New York City and Long Island from a Shell Oil Co. subsidiary.
As a reverse option, El Jamal proposed to purchase at a 5 percent premium the assets of investors looking to get out of the Shell venture, using a high-interest, five-year mortgage from the sellers to finance the deal.
“Please understand that my current credibility and borrowing power has been completely destroyed for the meanwhile by one single man, our fellow investor James A. Weil,” El Jamal noted with his purchase offer.
The Shell deal that involved El Jamal, Silverman, Weil and three other investors was negotiated by El Jamal, the only partner experienced in the industry as a service-station owner and operator in Westchester and the Hudson Valley and as president of Wholesale Fuels, a fuel distributorship based in Thornwood. (In the fight for control of the companies, the 37-year-old El Jamal, according to his emails, has been forced to work from a satellite office in a Silverman-owned office building in downtown White Plains.)
El Jamal was the only personal guarantor on a $33-million loan from Manufacturers and Traders Trust Co. that completed the deal. The loan agreement requires that El Jamal remain an active manager of the business to avoid default, as El Jamal”™s attorney, Albert J. Pirro Jr., argued in court.
State Supreme Court Justice William J. Giacomo last year and again in January temporarily barred Silverman and Weil from removing El Jamal as manager. But the judge, who has imposed a gag order on parties in the entwined New York and Connecticut cases, in January also ruled that El Jamal”™s partners could sell their 3-year-old business without his consent. El Jamal has appealed that decision.
The court injunction blocking El Jamal”™s removal as manager was to be lifted in mid-April if he failed to post a $1 million insurance-company bond required by the court to cover costs and damages for his opponents from the injunction if it was found invalid. But in the week before the court deadline, Pirro asked the court”™s permission to withdraw his law firm as El Jamal”™s attorney. According to a challenge filed by attorneys for Silverman and Weil, who called the move to change attorneys “a sham” and “transparent dodge,” Pirro claimed that he was owed about $73,000 by his client, and gave that as the reason for withdrawing. .
El Jamal, in an April 12 email to Silverman, said of Pirro: “Al has gotten paid about $600,000 so far to stand there and be called names with me!”
Two days before the court deadline, attorneys at another White Plains firm retained by El Jamal, Cuddy & Feder L.L.P., filed an appeal of the judge”™s bond order.
In their Connecticut businesses, Silverman seeks to remove El Jamal as manager and partner in a Wholesale Fuels distributorship and several gas stations in Fairfield County. Â As it moved toward a non-jury trial in White Plains, the trial judge, Supreme Court Justice Gerald E. Loehr, recently recused himself from the case. El Jamal”™s parents are his next-door neighbors and long-time acquaintances of his wife, the judge said.
Calling his settlement offers “fair and reasonable,” El Jamal told his rivals he “must stay in the business. This is who I am and what I do. This isn”™t a passing fancy for me. I have been in the gasoline industry since I was 16 years old. I am aware that everyone has their own personal problems but this is my only way of making money.”
El Jamal also has real estate interests in Westchester County and outside New York. They include a 50 percent interest in the proposed site of a Costco Wholesale Club in Yorktown. El Jamal in March was ordered by a state Supreme Court judge to drop his opposition to a pending $6-million sale of the property, where Costco plans to add a gas filling station that likely would undercut pump prices at El Jamal”™s and his family”™s stations in the area.
El Jamal also is a concessions contractor at Westchester County Airport, where this year he opened a Dunkin”™ Donuts franchise.
