Two high-profile California attorneys, Brian S. Kabateck and Mark Geragos, are under investigation by the state bar in connection with a purportedly corrupt process for distributing payments in Armenian genocide cases.
Kabateck and Geragos were two of the lawyers involved in groundbreaking cases that allowed Armenians to recover insurance payments for the deaths of their family members killed in the genocide that ravaged their country more than a century ago. In March, the LA Times reported that corrupt acts spoiled the reparations process by diverting funds to outsiders.
In announcing the ethics probe on Tuesday, the State Bar of California thanked the newspaper “for its excellent reporting on the distribution of Armenian Genocide settlement funds.” The bar further stressed that the announcement isn’t “an indication of any misconduct by the attorneys being investigated.”
The probe comes as the California bar copes with the implosion of the Girardi Keese law firm, amid criticism that the regulator of more than 250,000 state-licensed lawyers was lax in its big firm oversight. Plaintiffs lawyer Thomas Girardi, who was accused of stealing money from clients and co-counsel, was disbarred in July.
Kabateck told Bloomberg Law that an independent third-party that was appointed, approved, and oversaw by the court distributed the settlement funds to class members.
Neither Kabateck nor Geragos were “involved in any decision relating to individual payments to victims, nor were they able to decide, review, or influence claims made by class members,” Kabateck said in an email Tuesday. “We have fully cooperated with multiple prior investigations and inquiries conducted by the State Bar and others (all of whom found no wrongdoing).”
Geragos said they filed a lawsuit when they discovered the misconduct, and they cooperated with three separate State Bar investigations.
“No good deed goes unpunished,” Geragos said in an email.
The state bar acknowledged the shadow cast by the Girardi affair in its probe announcement.
“Confidence in our ability to do so has unfortunately been shaken in recent times by the Girardi matter and what it represents. Restoring and maintaining the public’s trust in the disciplinary apparatus of this agency is imperative,” said the State Bar of California’s Board of Trustees Chair Ruben Duran. “To that end, it is important to emphasize that the State Bar investigates possible misconduct wherever it might occur.”
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