Font Size: 
Lawyer Seeks Dismissal of 'Scandalous' Complaint Against Prince of Monaco
The American Lawyer
November 12, 2009
Stanley Arkin of Arkin Kaplan Rice is defending a prince in a breach of contract case that involves a most unprincely amount of money. His Serene Highness Prince Albert II of Monaco -- we'll refer to him as H.S.H. -- is being sued for about $60,000. The plaintiff, Robert Eringer of Santa Barbara, claims that H.S.H. stiffed him on one quarterly payment for investigative work he conducted for Monaco between 2005 and 2007.
Arkin smells a shakedown. After removing the case from California state court to Los Angeles federal district court, Arkin filed a motion to dismiss, claiming that before Eringer filed suit, he sent H.S.H. a letter demanding $600,000. When H.S.H. refused to pay him off, Arkin writes, Eringer filed a complaint "replete with grandiose, scurrilous, and largely irrelevant allegations, redolent of a crude 'shake-down' or blatant extortion." Here's the "scurrilous" complaint that provoked Arkin's attack, which does indeed feature quite a salacious tale of sex, arms dealers, billionaires and espionage.
Arkin's legal argument for dismissing Eringer's suit is pretty straightforward: His client is a head of state protected by the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. But his motion doesn't stop there. In addition to tossing the case, he wants the court to strike the complaint's "voluminous, immaterial, impertinent, and scandalous matter." Arkin writes that the "allegations appear to have been included solely to elicit media interest, to a cast a 'derogatory light' on defendant, and to create extortive pressure on Prince Albert; they should be therefore stricken."
We called Arkin -- mainly we wanted to know how he ended up H.S.H. as a client -- but he wasn't immediately available.
Bringham Ricks of Ricks Law, who represents Erigner, told us that the suit was "absolutely not" a shakedown. He told us that since H.S.H. ignored his client and tried to deny that the two knew each other, it was necessary "to put down all the facts to show that there was a relationship."
This article first appeared on The Am Law Litigation Daily blog on AmericanLawyer.com.
