How a $30-million federal lawsuit was blown up over breakfast
It was a friendly morning meal at the Mission Inn to make sure there were no hard feelings after years of litigation.
Attorney Jim Lance was eating with Lawrence Goda and his wife, who had just agreed to be part of a nearly $5-million settlement against Lance’s Saudi client, businessman Tarek Al-Shawaf.
As the pair engaged in small talk and broke bread, Goda dropped a bombshell.
Almost six years earlier, he said, two U.S. Forest Service firefighters told him that the Mountain fire didn’t start on Al-Shawaf’s property, as the lawsuits and government claimed. They believed it started hundreds of feet away from the property.
Read more: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-08-08/mountain-fire-lawsuit-blows-up
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