Motorola dismisses setback in Swiss court

A decision by the District Court of Zurich last week not to freeze assets belonging to the owners of Turkish telecommunications company Telsim Mobil Telekomunikasyon Hizmetleri is unimportant, given that a higher Swiss court has already frozen many of the family’s assets, Motorola said in a statement Sunday.

Two weeks ago, Motorola was awarded $4.26 billion against the Uzan family, which controls Telsim, in a U.S. District Court for perpetrating a massive fraud against Motorola.

“Today’s decision by a lower Swiss court is … largely irrelevant since up to $800 million of the Uzans’ assets in Switzerland remain frozen under the Swiss Federal Supreme Court ruling,” Motorola said in its statement. “The decision is also contrary to court decisions around the world against the Uzans … in the U.K., Bermuda, Isle of Man, Guernsey, Jersey, France, Germany and the U.S.”

Motorola said that it will appeal the decision in the Supreme Court of the Canton of Zurich, which has once before overturned a pro-Uzan ruling made by the Zurich district court. Switzerland operates politically as a federation of 23 cantons or states, with considerable authority remaining decentralized.

Any respite for the Uzan family has been short. On Sunday, the official Anatolian news agency reported that Turkish police had taken action to detain 12 people including family patriarch Kemal Uzan, his son Hakan Uzan and relative Yavuz Uzan under an investigation into corruption at the family-owned bank Turkiye Imar Bankasi TAS.

Hakan Uzan is also Telsim’s chief executive officer; in December 2002 his politically-active brother Cem Uzan was sentenced in the U.K. to 15 months imprisonment for contempt of court in that he failed to appear in the U.K. to testify in the Motorola case.