“She’s a private lawyer at this point, but she’s been appointed as an overseer of this company, not to profit from it, but to make sure it is running correctly and doing the right thing,” Davidson said.
He said his team will prove that Rodriguez and the other board members never received any extra compensation and that they reasonably believed their business judgments were in the best interests of Eastern National Bank.
The trial resumes on Monday morning with testimony from the first witnesses.
Bancor and Franeker filed the suit against the bank’s leadership in January 2022, claiming the directors allowed the bank to sidestep U.S. penalties in order to benefit the Venezuelan government.
The case has been marked by strife between counsel representing the warring parties, with Diaz Reus & Targ LLP attorney Michael Diaz being disqualified in April 2023 after a magistrate judge determined that he had an attorney-client relationship with the bank’s beneficial owner between 1996 and 1998.
The directors hit back with their own disqualification bid against plaintiffs’ counsel León Cosgrove Jiménez LLP over alleged misuse of privileged documents, but that request was denied.
