Prim Capital, a firm that has been auditing NBA players' finances, and financial adviser CSI Capital Management have settled a bitter legal dispute and publicly apologized for making public statements charging each other with business improprieties.
NBA player agent Raymond Brothers, meanwhile, said that Prim attributed "erroneous" statements to him in its lawsuit against CSI Capital Management.
Among other things, Prim, a Cleveland-based firm that had been hired by the NBA players association to audit players' finances, attributed to Brothers statements that CSI paid $100,000 to a friend of NBA player Danny Fortson to get Fortson's business and then "delivered" Fortson to agent Arn Tellem.
"I simply never said virtually any of the things that Prim claims I said," Brothers said in a statement released last week.
Prim and CSI, a San Francisco firm that is a major player in the business of managing athletes' money, in a joint statement claimed they were "recipients of either erroneous or incomplete information concerning the business and activities of the other. ...
"On closer examination, Prim and CSI acknowledge that the public statements which charged improper practices were based on incomplete, out-of-date, or erroneous third party information. Each party now more fully understands the business of the other, and retracts and apologizes for the inaccurate public statements which charged improprieties."
Representatives of Prim and CSI as well as Brothers and his attorney declined comment beyond the written statements. Tellem could not immediately be reached for comment.
CSI sued Prim in April, alleging that the purpose of Prim's audits of NBA players was to steal those players as clients for itself. Prim countersued in May, alleging that the purpose of CSI's lawsuit was to stop Prim from performing audits on CSI's NBA player clients. That countersuit contained allegations from Brothers, Fortson's current agent. Fortson is a client of CSI and a former client of Prim's.
In his statement, Brothers said he had conversations with Prim because the National Basketball Players Association "supported the audits" and because he thought the conversations were confidential. But Brothers said Prim tape-recorded one of his conversations, without his knowledge, and misrepresented what he said.
CSI obtained that tape through the legal discovery process. "It was CSI's discovery of Prim's inaccuracies that compelled Prim to settle," Brothers said.
