A judge in Arizona granted Mat Grella, the former president of NEXA Mortgage, a motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the company. NEXA has accused Grella of causing the failure of a $24 million hangar-office property purchase and the brokerage firm is preparing to file an amended complaint.
The saga began in March when Grella was terminated from NEXA amid buyout negotiations and a lawsuit in which he accused partner Mike Kortas of making aircraft-related purchases with company money without his consent. Kortas denies this allegation.
NEXA fired back by filing a countersuit. It accuses Grella of acting to defame Kortas, and it includes claims of tortious interference after Grella allegedly sent messages to the broker, seller and title company, which stated that the company was not authorized to purchase a five-acre airplane hangar leasehold in Mesa, Arizona. The communication caused the transaction to fail.
When granting Grella a motion to dismiss NEXA’s lawsuit, Judge Scott McCoy of the Maricopa County Superior Court added as background that NEXA’s operating agreement states that the company’s purpose is to be a mortgage brokerage.
According to the court filing, the agreement provides Kortas with managerial control but permits NEXA to engage in other types of business dealings only with the unanimous consent of its ownership.
“Extolling the virtues of notice pleading is fine, but letters of intent on commercial property that ultimately go nowhere are legion,” McCoy wrote. “Apart from that, is it truly Mr. Kortas’s view that due diligence on a $25 million real estate transaction would not have involved someone asking about Nexa’s basic authority to make such a transaction?”
McCoy added that “alleging defamation without at least some examples of defamatory statements reduces those counts to bare legal conclusions.”
James Brody, a senior partner at Garris Horn and an attorney for NEXA, said that the court’s order “was made without prejudice, and an amended complaint will soon be filed, which I believe will be very difficult to dismiss at this stage.”
“While Arizona is a notice-pleading state and has reaffirmed such a rule, we believe the standard was not adhered to. All in all, with the amended complaint being prepared to file as soon as the end of this week and with the Court not saying its Order was made with prejudice, I would not look at this Order as being the last word,” Brody told HousingWire.
Grella wrote the following statement to HousingWire.
“I look forward to continuing to prove the facts of my own lawsuit, filed in March, in which I describe Mr. Kortas’ breaches of both his fiduciary duties as manager of NEXA and our operating agreement. I am concerned for NEXA, which I am extremely proud to have helped build, and I hope we can resolve these issues in NEXA’s best interests,” he said.
According to the motion to dismiss, NEXA can file a second amended complaint on or before Oct. 8. McCoy, however, states that the company may “wish to reconsider” the request since the claims to date are “quite poor.”
Kortas and Grella founded NEXA seven years ago after leaving Equity Prime Mortgage. As of Wednesday, NEXA was the largest U.S. mortgage brokerage firm, with 2,726 sponsored loan officers and 247 active branches, per the Nationwide Multistate Licensing System (NMLS).