Woo vs. Harmon - Witness Gilbert Tam

David C. Farmer, Successor-Trustee vs. Harmon

(Formerly Woo vs. Harmon & Nicholson vs. Harmon)

U.S. District Court For the District of Hawaii

—

DEFENDANT’S WITNESS

GILBERT TAM

Former Director of Administration, Kamehameha Schools; Director, P&C Insurance Co.; Executive Officer, Bank of Hawaii; Executive Officer, Sandwich Isles Communications; witness in EQ2048; named in Defendant’s RICO lawsuit.

c/o Matt A. Tsukazaki, Esq.
Torkildson Katz Fonseca Jaffe Moore & Hetherington
AmFac Tower, 700 Bishop Street, Floor 15
Honolulu, HI 96813

Email: mat@torkildson.com

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NEW DISCOVERY (10-11-08): Additional facts regarding conflicts of interests between Steven Guttman and numerous parties related to this case:

www.kycbs.net/Google-Steven-Guttman.htm

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NEW UPDATE (09-07-08):

EARL I. ANZAI
Attorney General of Hawaii

DOROTHY D. SELLERS
HUGH R. JONES
Deputy Attorneys General
425 Queen Street
Honolulu, Hawaii 96813

Attorneys for the Beneficiaries

IN THE CIRCUIT COURT OF THE FIRST CIRCUIT

STATE OF HAWAII

In the Matter of the Estate

BERNICE P. BISHOP,

Deceased.

EQUITY NO. 2048 KSCC

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REPORT OF ATTORNEY GENERAL CONCERNING MAY 7, 1999 ORDER

The May 7, 1999 order regarding orders to show cause requires the former trustees immediately to resign offices and directorships in the trust’s subsidiary and affiliated organizations... P&C Insurance Company, Inc., is a captive insurance company, the sole stock holder which is Pauahi Holdings Inc.

The Attorney General respectfully invites the court’s attention to the annual report publicly filed on March 28, 2000 by P&C (Ex. 1). The annual report lists Henry H. Peters as a director. The Attorney General is unable to determine whether the listing is incorrect; or whether Peters remains a director in violation of court order. The Attorney General’s several inquiries of the trust concerning this matter remain unanswered despite the passage of three months (Ex. 2).

DATED: Honolulu, Hawaii, May 5, 2000

Respectfully submitted,

<s> DOROTHY SELLERS
Deputy Attorney General

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DECLARATION OF DOROTHY SELLERS

DOROTHY SELLERS hereby states:

1. I am a deputy attorney general, and I am familiar with the case records and files in Hawaii First Circuit Court Equity No. 2048 going back to approximately August 1997.

2. I have personal knowledge of the facts contained in this declaration and am competent to testify to them.

3. Exhibit 1 is a true and correct copy of the annual report of P&C Insurance Company for the year ending Dec. 31, 1999, filed in late March 2000.

4, Exhibit 2 is a true and correct letter of my February 15, 2000 letter to counsel for the trust asking for verification that Henry Peters had resigned from P&C and the effective date of the resignation. I have never received a response to that letter.

5. On March 13, 2000, deputy attorney general Hugh Jones wrote trustee Libkuman (with a copy to general counsel Colleen Wong) about a number of matters. The final two paragraphs of that letter are:

Finally, we also requested some time ago copies of Henry Peters’ letters of resignation from directorships and ex officio positions, and specifically from P&C Insurance Company. Although the resignation letters of the other trustees were filed with the Court, Peters’ were not.

Please respond to these requests before March 31, 2000. Thank you.

I DECLARE UNDER PENALTY OF PERJURY THAT THE FOREGOING IS TRUE AND CORRECT.

DATED: Honolulu, Hawaii, May 5, 2000

www.kycbs.net/Doc-EQ2048-PC-Peters-5-5-0.pdf

www.kycbs.net/PC-Arms-Length-Guide-10-1-94.pdf

www.kycbs.net/Doc-EQ2048-Mediation-Order-3-9-0.pdf

www.kycbs.net/KSBE-INTERROGATORIES.htm

www.kycbs.net/RICO-In-Paradise.htm

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NEW DISCOVERY (03-27-08): New facts related to Bank of Hawaii’s branch operations in Palau (which were overseen by Gil Tam):

http://www.kycbs.net/PALAU.htm

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NEW DISCOVERY (02-09-08): Kamehameha Schools made a “confidential” settlement agreement with the plaintiff in the John Doe vs. Kamehameha Schools case, which my former attorney, John Goemans, Esq., says, according to what he has learned from the IRS, violates the rules for a non-profit charitable trust:

February 9, 2008

$7M

An attorney involved in a challenge to Kamehameha Schools' Hawaiians-only policy reveals the amount of a settlement

By Ken Kobayashi, Honolulu Star-Bulletin

Kamehameha Schools made the first move to settle a legal challenge to their admissions policy giving preference to native Hawaiians and later agreed to pay $7 million, a lawyer involved in the case said yesterday.

John Goemans, an attorney for an unnamed non-native Hawaiian student who filed a lawsuit contesting the policy, said the charitable trust offered for the first time to talk about an out-of-court settlement last May, just days before the U.S. Supreme Court was to decide whether to hear the case.

Goemans, a former Big Island attorney recuperating in Florida from heart surgery, and Sacramento, Calif., lawyer Eric Grant, the lead attorney, represented the unnamed student and his mother.

"They (the schools) approached Eric and said we wanted to settle and we have to settle by Friday morning," when it was believed the high court was to make a decision about accepting the case, Goemans said.

He said it appeared the high court would accept their appeal of an 8-7 decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that upheld the policy.

"They (the schools) were worried about losing in the Supreme Court," Goemans said.

Goemans said he did not know how Grant and the Kamehameha Schools arrived at the $7 million figure.

The hotly disputed federal civil rights lawsuit caused a firestorm of controversy among Kamehameha Schools supporters who believed the challenge struck at the more than century-old admissions policy and the heart of the charitable trust's mission to educate children of Hawaiian ancestry.

The confidential settlement was announced on May 14. Those connected with the case repeatedly refused to disclose the terms.

Goemans said he was disclosing the amount because he said he recently learned from Internal Revenue Service officials that Kamehameha Schools, a tax-exempt charitable trust, cannot keep the figure confidential.

"Because exempt organizations operate in the public good, you got to report all your expenses with particularity, and you cannot keep information relative to those expenses confidential," he said. "It's in the public interest to have full disclosure."

Ann Botticelli, Kamehameha Schools spokeswoman, said yesterday the settlement contained a confidentiality clause.

"We intend to honor the terms, and we will not be discussing the settlement or John Goemans' assertions," she said.

Grant said yesterday he had no comment.

Kamehameha Schools, a multibillion-dollar charitable trust and the state's largest private landowner, was established under the 1883 will of Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop. It educates more than 6,700 students at its flagship campus at Kapalama Heights, two other campuses on Maui and the Big Island, and 31 preschools throughout the state.

Senior U.S. District Judge Alan Kay upheld the school's Hawaiians-first policy, but a panel of the appeals court in San Francisco ruled 2-1 that the practice violated federal civil rights laws. That decision triggered statewide protests and marches by school supporters.

Later, a larger appeals court panel voted 8-7 to uphold the policy.

It was an appeal by Grant of that 8-7 ruling that was on the doorsteps of the U.S. Supreme Court when the settlement was announced.

At the time, school officials indicated that the settlement calling for the dismissal of the lawsuit leaves intact the appeals court's 8-7 decision upholding the admissions policy.

But the dismissal does not guarantee that another lawsuit might surface and make its way to the high court, although it would first have to go through the federal trial and appeals courts, where the 8-7 ruling would be considered to be binding on the issue. But even if those who file the new lawsuit lose on those two levels, they could still ask the high court to review the case.

Honolulu attorney David Rosen said he has plaintiffs for a lawsuit to challenge the admissions policy. He said the settlement does not affect his case. Rosen said he expects the suit will be filed this year.

Goemans said Grant received 40 percent, or $2.8 million of the $7 million. Goemans said he is preparing to file his own lawsuit seeking to recover a "reasonable percentage" of the $7 million for his work in the case.

Goemans said he found the unnamed student and arranged for Grant to be the attorney for the student and his mother.

"I put the whole thing together," Goemans said. "But for me there would not have been a $7 million payment."

The student never was admitted to Kamehameha Schools because his case was pending. He has since graduated from high school and had been attending college, Grant said last year.

http://starbulletin.com/2008/02/09/news/story02.html

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February 9, 2008

Amount of settlement
raises critical concern

By Robert Shikina, rshikina@starbulletin.com

Supporters and critics expressed surprise yesterday at the $7 million Kamehameha Schools paid a student to settle a lawsuit disputing its Hawaiians-first admission policy.

One Kamehameha Schools alumnus says disclosure of the settlement with the anonymous, non-Hawaiian student will prompt questions among Hawaiians.

"I'm not happy with $7 million," said Kamehameha Schools alumnus Jan E. Hanohano Dill. "Unfortunately, that's a lot of money, and it's going to create a lot of questions in the Hawaiian community whether it was right or wrong and to continue."

Dill, also a board member of Na Pua a Ke Ali'i Pauahi, a nonprofit group whose members include students, parents, and alumni of Kamehameha Schools, said he continues to support the school's decision.

"I don't know the details, and I think that's something that has to be cleared," he said. "You settle because you want to avoid costs that would be incurred as you go forward."

He added, "I have to believe that they understood that this was something good for the Hawaiian people. ... It will be clear as things unfold whether that was true."

Dill, who is also president of the nonprofit Partners in Development Foundation, said the admissions policy must eventually be addressed and that the settlement avoids this case but does not stop other cases.

Marion Joy, former vice president of Na Pua, called the settlement a "misuse of trust funds."

"The trust is continually going to be challenged," she said. "This is not going to be the last. ... As far as settling for the particular lawsuit, it's not in the best interests of the beneficiaries (of the 1883 will of Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop)."

Kamehameha Schools declined comment.

Honolulu attorney David Rosen, who has sought potential clients to sue Kamehameha over its admissions policy after the settlement, sent out a statement yesterday that said the $7 million settlement was used to "buy off this case."

He added that the trustees should open a campus on the Leeward Coast of Oahu and possibly Molokai where increased educational opportunities are needed.

H. William Burgess, a retired attorney and founder of Aloha for All, a group opposed to Hawaiian sovereignty, said the settlement raises questions about the proper use of the trust funds.

"Normally, trustees, if they're doubtful about doing something, they ask the court to give them instructions," he said. "Yet in this case, the biggest charitable trust, probably in the nation, instead of welcoming the opportunity to get the highest court in the land to settle it, they pay $7 million to leave it open. And it is very much open."

http://starbulletin.com/2008/02/09/news/story03.html

* * *

From The Catbird Seat website:

The Wise Old Owl asks: How much of the settlement amount came from Kamehameha’s insurance companies, and how much came from the trust funds? How much did Kamehameha Schools (and/or their insurance company) spend for defense costs in this case before they decided to settle? Who is their insurance company? Their insurance broker? Who actually signed the Settlement Agreement?

http://www.kycbs.net/Bishop7.htm

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NEW DISCOVERY (12/09/07):

March 25, 2007

The not-so-simple story
of Barack Obama's youth

Shaped by different worlds,
an outsider found ways to fit in

By Kirsten Scharnberg and Kim Barker, Chicago Tribune

HONOLULU - The life stories, when the presidential candidate tells them, have a common theme: the quest to belong.

A boy wants to find his place in a family where he is visibly different: chubby where others are thin, dark where others are light.

A youth living in a distant land searches and finds new friends, a new language and a heartbreaking lesson about his identity in the pages of an American magazine.

A young black man struggles for acceptance at an institution of privilege, where he finds himself growing so angry and disillusioned at the world around him that he turns to alcohol and drugs.

These have been the stories told about the first two character-shaping decades of U.S. Sen. Barack Obama's life, a story line largely shaped by his own best-selling memoir, political speeches and interviews.

But the reality of Obama's narrative is not that simple.

More than 40 interviews with former classmates, teachers, friends and neighbors in his childhood homes of Hawaii and Indonesia, as well as a review of public records, show the arc of Obama's personal journey took him to places and situations far removed from the experience of most Americans.

At the same time, several of his oft-recited stories may not have happened in the way he has recounted them. Some seem to make Obama look better in the retelling, others appear to exaggerate his outward struggles over issues of race, or simply skim over some of the most painful, private moments of his life.

The handful of black students who attended Punahou School in Hawaii, for instance, say they struggled mightily with issues of race and racism there. But absent from those discussions, they say, was another student then known as Barry Obama.

Hawaii had become a state only two years before Obama's birth, and there were plenty of native Hawaiians still deeply unhappy about it. The U.S. military was expanding on the island of Oahu, home to the new capital of Honolulu. And a young, iconoclastic white woman who had defied the social mores of the day by marrying a dashing black man from Kenya was coping with the fact that her new husband essentially had abandoned her and their young child in 1963 to study at Harvard....

In the six weeks since Obama announced his intention to run for the White House, he routinely has suggested that his diverse background--raised for a time in the Third World, schooled at elite institutions and active in urban politics--makes him the best-suited candidate to speak to rich and poor, black and white, mainstream voters and those utterly disenchanted with the political system.

Not as well known is the fact that the many people who raised him were nearly as diverse as the places where he grew up. There was his mother, Ann, a brilliant but impulsive woman; his grandmother Madelyn, a deeply private and stoically pragmatic Midwesterner; his grandfather Stanley, a loving soul inclined toward tall tales and unrealistic dreams....

During her son's earliest years, Obama's mother, whose full name was Stanley Ann Dunham because her father desperately had wished for a boy, attended college at the University of Hawaii. Known as Ann throughout her adult life, she kept to herself. She became estranged from her husband, Barack Obama Sr., after his departure for Harvard and rarely saw the group of friends that they had made at the University of Hawaii.

One of those friends, Neil Abercrombie, then a graduate student in the sociology department, frequently would see young Obama around town with his grandfather Stanley, whom Obama called "Gramps."...

"Stanley loved that little boy," said Abercrombie, now a Democratic congressman from Hawaii. "In the absence of his father, there was not a kinder, more understanding man than Stanley Dunham. He was loving and generous."...

Madelyn Dunham, a rising executive at the Bank of Hawaii during Obama's Punahou days, was more reserved but seemed to love having her grandson's friends over to play and hang out....

Ann and the boy lived with the Dunhams in Honolulu until Obama was 6. Then his young mother, now divorced, met and married an Indonesian student studying at the University of Hawaii....

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Witness Gilbert Tam is expected to testify as to the facts and circumstances of the settlement; his relationships with Defendant Bobby Harmon, Judge David Ezra, Judge Kevin Chang, Judge Barry Kurren, Faye Kurren, The Nature Conservancy, The Hawaii Nature Conservancy, The Nature Conservancy of Palau, Judge Eden Elizabeth Hifo (fka Judge Bambi Weil), P&C Insurance Company; William S. Richardson; Rodney Park; Clyde Mark; Jean Rolles; Arnold Morgado; Rocco Sansone; Marsh & McLennan Co.; Rey Graulty; Wayne Metcalf; J.C. Schmidt; Craig Watanabe; Dee Jay Mailer; Edwina Clarke; and others.

Gilbert Tam is also expected to testify regarding his business, professional, political and personal relationships with Bank of Hawaii; Bank of Hawaii-Palau Branch; Robert Clarke; Eric Yeaman; Robert K.U. Kihune; Sandwich Isles Communications; Summit Communications; Michael Powell; The Federal Communications Commission; Carol Muranaka; Steven Guttman; Mary Lou Woo; Lawrence Johnson; Micah Kane, Department of Hawaiian Homelands, Haunani Apoliona, Todd Hoch; Margo Corliss; Waimana Enterprises, Inc.; Thomas T. Okamura; Al Hee; Clayton Hee; Office of Hawaiian Affairs; Summit Communications; Harold C. Johnston; Grant Johnston; Frank Carlucci; Carlyle Group; Kissinger Associates; MacArthur Foundation; Adele Smith Simmons; WCI Communities; Matsuo Takabuki; Wally Chin; Nathan Aipa; Louanne Kam; Colleen Wong; Lyn Anzai; Earl Anzai; Guido Giacometti; Sukamto Sia; William Rosehill; Sandie Wicklein; Sam Hata; Yukio Takemoto; Dennis Fern; Andrea Oshiro; Ramona Hinck; Doyal Davis; Maryanne Inouye; Bruce Nakaoka; Eric Martinson; Aaron Au; Daniel Jones; Mitch Gilbert; Sydney Keliipuleole; Charles Maeda; Neil Hannahs; Michael Chun; Ed Tabangay; Mark McConaghy; PricewaterhouseCoopers; Allen Young; Glenn Hara; Cary Okawa; Dennis Tsuhaka; Carl Kobayashi; William S. Richardson; Henry Peters; Matt Tsukazaki; Richard Wong; Paul Cathcart; Bank of Honolulu; HonFed Savings & Loan; Investor’s Equity; Azabu USA Inc.; Mitsui Trust; Kona Enterprises; Peter Trask; David Trask; James Duffy; Benjamin Matsubara; Maui County Planning Department; Linda Lingle; Colbert Matsumoto; Island Insurance Co.; Barack Obama, Madelyn Dunham; Pacific LightNet, Aloha Airlines, David C. Farmer, and others to be named upon discovery.

Gilbert Tam is expected to testify regarding possible bribes, bid-rigging, excessive charges, fraud, tax fraud, money laundering, non-reporting of claims to KSBE’s and P&C’s insurance brokers (Marsh & McLennan and Aon Risk Managers) and carriers (Federal Insurance and XL), and unfair claims practices.

Gilbert Tam is also expected to testify regarding KSBE’s alleged practice of requiring its Notaries Public to notarize signatures of the Trustees and others without witnessing the signatures or having the signatory initial the Notary Log. He is expected to testify regarding KSBE’s alleged practice of “influencing” the “independent” appraiser property valuations.

Gilbert Tam is expected to testify whether he, Henry Peters, Richard Wong, or other trustees, officers, directors, employees or independent contractors of KSBE or any of its subsidiaries received any financial considerations or benefits from any companies in which Marsh & McLennan and KSBE had common financial interests (i.e., Mid-Ocean Reinsurance, Centre Reinsurance, Ace Ltd., Zurich, Chubb Group, Goldman Sachs, etc.), including bribes, kick-backs, quid pro quo, loan guarantees from Bank of Hawaii, or any other type of financial incentives.

Gilbert Tam is also expected to testify regarding his personal investments, or investments by any family members, in McKenzie Methane.

As a former director of P&C Insurance Company, Gilbert Tam is expected to testify regarding the circumstances of Harmon’s termination as President of that company, including the names of all persons making recommendations to the board of directors that Harmon be terminated, the reasons given for the termination, and whether or not he voted for, or against, the termination.

Gilbert Tam is also expected to testify regarding his business, professional, political and personal relationships with the Bank of Hawaii, Palau Branch, and the Elvin R. Meek Probate Case.

Internet References:

Chronologies

www.kycbs.net/BH-CHRON-88-96.htm

www.kycbs.net/BH-CHRON-97-99.htm

www.kycbs.net/BH-Settlement-Chronology.htm

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