SANTA FE — A jury here has awarded a former senior VP at Zia Credit Union $1.5 million as part of a lawsuit against the credit union over a land deal that had soured.
Former Zia CU Senior Vice President Edwin Ortiz was awarded $800,000 in actual damages and $700,000 in punitive damages.
“The jury made it clear they were angry at the credit union management…,” Ortiz’s attorney told the Albuquerque Journal.
The credit union disagrees.
“We certainly don’t think that the verdict reflects the evidence in the case,” Ross Crown, an attorney for Zia, told the Journal. Crown added Zia Credit Union will seek to have the verdict overturned, and also emphasized, according to the report, that Zia stresses the case involves events from more than eight years ago.
According to Ortiz’s lawsuit, filed in 2015, Zia Credit Union was considering an expansion into the Pojoaque Valley of New Mexico when, in 2007, a competitor offered to buy 1.3 cares that Ortiz had inherited for a branch site. “Ortiz reported the offer to his superiors, and Zia eventually bought the property for $1.625 million,” the Albuquerque Journal reported. “Zia demolished structures on the land, including a four-unit apartment building and home of Ortiz’s late mother.
“But when Larry Knoll took over as Zia’s president, Knoll accused Ortiz, a 20-year Zia employee, of deceiving the credit union board about the property’s value and his ownership of the site, says the suit,” the Journal reported. “Knoll fired Ortiz in May 2012 ‘to appease regulators’ despite the fact the Zia board ‘was aware at all times that the property belonged to Mr. Ortiz and of the two appraisals on the land.”
The Albuquerque Journal reported that Zia Credit Union made a counterclaim that Ortiz should have had no part in the “insider transaction” and that Ortiz “played an improper role” in pushing the transaction while misrepresenting several details, the counterclaims allege.”
“The unfavorable terms of the transaction and the insider nature of the land purchase agreement attracted scrutiny from Zia’s regulators,” said the credit union’s filing, and lack of regulatory approval led Zia to exercise its right to terminate the land purchase agreement, according to the Journal.
Zia argued that Ortiz had failed to “appropriately” disclose an appraisal that said the property, including buildings, was worth only $500,000. The Journal reported that another former Zia senior VP who was a “close” acquaintance of Ortiz negotiated the land deal for the credit union, according to the countersuit, and that Ortiz took advantage of the relationship to strike unfavorable terms for the credit union.