Lol, yeah this is going to end well for ze deepstate hehe.
"The fight over whether Ericsson will have to defend itself in court against the relatives of American terror victims has now entered a new stage.
This week, legal representatives for the telecom giant responded to the lawsuit from August.
The class action claims as fact that Ericsson has bribed IS. Therefore, with the support of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), the company must be held responsible for American victims of IS and al-Qaeda.
But the lawsuit is, among other things, wrong about Ericsson’s corporate structure, copies other lawsuits, confuses terrorist groups and comes after any crimes have expired, Ericsson’s lawyers thunder.
“Ericsson is trying to have JASTA declared incompatible with the US Constitution. It is not directly a sign that Ericsson takes responsibility for what the company has done,” says Ryan Sparacino to Dagens industri.
Through his law firm in Washington, DC, he represents the 528 individuals in the class action. The agency is small, with just 13 employees listed on the website.
528 RELATED VOTES
On August 5, Ericsson was sued in a District of Columbia (DC) court
528 relatives of American victims of IS and al-Qaeda’s terror are demanding an as yet undetermined financial responsibility from Ericsson.
Several well-known families are included in the class action, including relatives of journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff.
They were beheaded in August and September 2014 respectively, after which videos of the murders were posted on social media.
The representative, the law firm of Sparacino PLLC, is demanding a trial by jury.
Ericsson, however, seems to be taking the mood very seriously. Initially, a medium-sized agency in Washington DC, Miller & Chevalier, was hired. But for some time now, Ericsson has engaged one of America’s leading law firms.
The three New York-based attorneys Sharon Cohen Levin, Robert Giuffra and David Rein have all been granted licenses to practice in DC this fall, a standard procedure for representing a client in another state.
All three are partners at Sullivan & Cromwell, a global law firm headquartered in New York.
It is one of the so-called White Shoe firms, with over a century of history and mainly recruiting from the best law schools of the Ivy League universities.
Sullivan & Cromwell’s 900 lawyers brought in the equivalent of SEK 18.5 billion in 2021, and was ranked by The American Lawyer magazine as one of the world’s most profitable agencies.
According to the magazine, a co-owner earned an average of over SEK 60 million last year.
Sharon Cohen Levin, Robert Giuffra and David Rein also belong to the agency’s absolute elite.
Sharon Cohen Levin was a former prosecutor in the Justice Department’s Southern New York District, which handles the major financial cases, for two decades. Business magazine Forbes has compared her to baseball legend Babe Ruth for her high hitting percentage. (Babe Ruth hit the most home runs in the league in twelve seasons around the 1920s.)
Robert Giuffra is one of the top executives at the firm, and the only attorney in the United States to boast nine MVP nominations, the most valuable player of the year, from the legal service Law360.
The agency highlights how Robert Giuffra received complaints from 150,000 consumers against Volkswagen and Audi in the so-called dieselgate, with manipulated emissions meters, written off in the United States.
David Rein is described as central to getting the US Supreme Court to overturn a lower court ruling in which the Arkansas state teachers’ pension fund sued Goldman Sachs for losses during the 2008 financial crisis.
The financial consequences if Ericsson were to lose in a possible lawsuit are very difficult to estimate.
DI’s review shows that there are a total of 193 victims. 170 were killed in direct connection to the deed – mostly suicide bombings or so-called IED bombs. Of the 23 who survived, one died of PTSD stress, and most of the others had one or more body parts blown off.
The case is not the only one where companies are accused of financing Islamist terrorists through bribes. But so far nothing like that has been decided.
Ericsson’s press service replies that it is “aware of the matter but declines to comment”.
Until this week, the case has exclusively concerned formalities, still not even the question of whether it meets the criteria to be tried has been up for consideration.
“The plaintiffs are looking forward to their day in court,” says Ryan Sparacino, however.
The judge in the case, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, is a 79-year-old with more than 25 years of federal court experience in D.C. She has judicially overruled several former presidents, and denied a request to intervene when Saddam Hussein was executed.
In the past, Sparacino represents over 3,000 American families who had family members killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, and accuses several global pharmaceutical companies of using bribes to Iraq’s health ministry to terrorize. One of the designated companies is Astra Zeneca, which, like Ericsson, is controlled by the Wallenberg sphere."
