John, left, and Louis Angelos, sons of Peter Angelos. (The Baltimore Sun, The Baltimore Sun / Baltimore Su)
The dueling lawsuits over control of the Orioles and other assets of longtime team owner Peter Angelos are being dropped by the parties, according to a court document.
It says the suits, pitting members of one of Baltimore’s most famous families against one another, are withdrawn and cannot be refiled. It also means the end of a bitter, public feud between Angelos’ sons — one of them aligned with their mother — over a fortune estimated to be worth more than a billion dollars.
The document says John and Louis Angelos and their mother, Georgia, agree “the actions in these consolidated proceedings … and all claims, including all counterclaims and defenses, asserted therein be dismissed with prejudice.”
The four-page document is dated Friday and has been signed electronically by an attorney for each Angelos family member, including a lawyer who the court appointed to represent Peter Angelos’ interests. It was obtained first by The Baltimore Sun and reported on early Monday; it appeared later Monday in the state court system’s online index of legal filings and hearings.
It did not include any details of the agreement to end the case; lawsuits are often dropped without any specifics being made public.
Jeffrey E. Nusinov, Louis Angelos’ attorney, declined Monday to comment. There was no immediate comment from the team or other attorneys involved in the case.
The feud broke into the open in June, when Louis Angelos sued his mother and older brother in Baltimore County Circuit Court over what he called his brother’s “plotting” to take over his father’s vast fortune. In addition to the team, of which Peter Angelos is the majority owner, he founded a downtown law firm and has numerous real estate holdings.
Georgia Angelos, 80, fired back with a suit against Louis Angelos in August, alleging he had sold the Angelos law firm to himself in what amounted to an act of “financial elder abuse” against his 93-year-old father.
Peter Angelos, who became incapacitated five years ago, had granted power of attorney to his wife, effectively making her the team owner. John Angelos runs the team as its chairman and CEO and was approved by Major League Baseball as the Orioles’ “control person,” meaning he is accountable to the league for the club.
The suits raised concerns among fans that the team could be sold or even relocated. Louis Angelos suggested in one filing that John Angelos, who has a home in Nashville, could move the team to Tennessee. In another filing, Georgia Angelos said she “had retained Goldman Sachs and Jones Day to provide investment banking and legal services in connection with the sale of the Orioles.”
John Angelos has sought throughout to assure fans the team would remain in Baltimore.
But the team’s decision on Wednesday — the deadline to exercise a five-year extension of its lease for Oriole Park at Camden Yards — to announce instead that it would continue negotiating for a new long-term lease failed to quiet all such jitters. The current lease is due to expire Dec. 31.
Baltimore Sun reporter Jean Marbella contributed to this article.
This article will be updated.
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Originally published at Tribune News Service