The legal battle between developers Masoud Shojaee and Ugo Colombo has just gone from zero to 100 — with a new $413,108 Ferrari brought into the fray.
Shoma Group‘s Shojaee has filed a new suit against Colombo’s exotic car dealership, the Collection, alleging breach of contract for failing to deliver a 2015 Ferrari 458 Speciale Aperta he had agreed to purchase. The car is allegedly being held hostage because of the fight between CMC Group’s Colombo and Shojaee over their canceled joint venture to develop the Collection Residences, a proposed condo project in Coral Gables located across the street from the dealership.
The suit alleges that the Collection’s failure to sell Shojaee the Ferrari has resulted in his loss of $250,000, because the Speciale’s market value is now $250,000 above its original sticker price.
“It’s the Collection’s way of punishing my client,” said Shojaee’s attorney Andrew Hall, senior managing partner of Hall, Lamb & Hall, “because essentially it’s ‘If you are my kind of guy we will honor our deal; if you do anything that upsets me, I’m going to take the car away from you, even though it’s worth $250,000 more than you are paying for it.'”
According to the suit, Shojaee had purchased 10 Ferraris over the past 15 years from the Collection, always paying sticker price. In March 2015, he ordered his latest, the white Ferrari 458 Speciale — a sports car for which Ferrari only manufactured 499 in 2015. He received an email confirmation, which Hall said equates to a contract.
In September 2015 the Collection called Shojaee to tell him his Speciale was in production, the suit alleges. Then, on Dec. 28, 2015, the dealership called him on his cell phone to tell him that the Speciale was on its way to the Collection, and that he could pick it up in a few days. Shojaee was later told that the sports car had arrived at the Collection. Yet despite several calls and text messages to the Collection, no one responded to tell Shojaee when to pick up his car, the suit alleges.
So on Jan. 5, 2016, Shojaee contacted the Collection’s president, Ken Gorin, to discuss delivery of the car. Gorin told him that “he first had to resolve his unrelated dispute with Ugo Colombo, co-owner of the Collection, before it would allow [Shojaee] to pick up the Speciale,” according to the suit.
Shojaee told Gorin that the dispute was “a completely independent matter from the purchase of the Speciale,” and said he wanted to pay for and pick it up. Still, the Collection failed to deliver the sports car, allegedly shutting Shojaee out of the $250,000 increase in value.
In response to the suit, the Collection issued a statement: “This is another frivolous lawsuit from an increasingly peculiar individual.”
The lawsuit marks the second suit Shojaee has filed this year against the Collection. In January, his Shoma Coral Gables filed suit against Gables Investment Holdings LLC; Colombo, individually; and the Collection. The suit follows a major falling out between Colombo and Shojaee in November, when they pulled out of their joint venture to develop the Collection Residences, a planned mixed-use project with 128 condo units in Coral Gables.
The first suit alleges that after Shoma “refused to capitulate to improper demands of CMC and Colombo, after having invested millions of dollars in the future project, Colombo and his company, CMC Group, proceeded to sabotage the entire project, causing substantial damages to Shoma.”