In 2009, a fire destroyed part of Peter Nygard’s property and he hasn’t yet been able to rebuild it, in part because his neighbour Louis Bacon, through Save The Bays, took on Mr. Nygard over dredging.
For years, Peter Nygard’s luxury home in the Bahamas was known as a paradise where the Winnipeg fashion magnate hosted legendary parties. On Monday, his lawyers will head to court to try to get the place back for him.
In late September, the home was seized by an official from the country’s Supreme Court and a squad of police. It followed a court win by Save The Bays, an environmental group co-founded by New York hedge-fund billionaire Louis Bacon, Mr. Nygard’s neighbour.
The group argued that Mr. Nygard owes it US$2.2-million in legal costs, in cases that alleged Mr. Nygard had illegally dredged the seafloor beyond his property to expand his beach.
The case is the latest skirmish in a long-running legal war between Mr. Nygard and Mr. Bacon. The enmity has led to more than a dozen lawsuits in multiple jurisdictions. One team of lawyers in Mr. Nygard’s legal brigade calls it a “modern-day Hatfields and McCoys.”
On Monday, lawyers for Mr. Nygard will be in court in Nassau to argue the house should have never been seized. They are also ready to put the cash up in escrow, while a new appeal on the dredging issue plays out next year.
For Mr. Nygard, whose women’s clothing company celebrated a half-century in business this year, the latest undulations of the battle in the Bahamas have become a fact of life.
“He was calm about it,” said Winnipeg lawyer Jay Prober, who was with Mr. Nygard in the Bahamas earlier this month. “We all felt what happened was totally unfair and should have never happened.”
Mr. Nygard and Mr. Bacon have adjacent properties in the gated community of Lyford Cay, about a half-hour’s drive west of Nassau on the Bahamian island of New Providence. The neighbours share an access road. The dispute started with parking and noise, and escalated from there.
In 2009, a fire destroyed part of Mr. Nygard’s property and he hasn’t yet been able to rebuild it, in part because Mr. Bacon, through Save The Bays, took on Mr. Nygard over dredging. Save The Bays says Mr. Nygard has doubled the size of his property since he bought it in 1984.
A 2013 court decision ordered Mr. Nygard to stop the dredging and in 2017 he was fined US$50,000 for contempt of court and ordered to pay Save The Bays’s legal costs.
Meanwhile, in New York in early 2015, Mr. Bacon filed a US$100-million defamation lawsuit against Mr. Nygard in the state’s Supreme Court. It alleged that Mr. Nygard “covertly waged an obsessive, deliberate and malicious campaign” against Mr. Bacon because Mr. Nygard believes Mr. Bacon was behind negative press in Forbes and on the CBC about Mr. Nygard.
“As a result, Nygard has developed an irrational belief that Mr. Bacon is his nemesis,” the suit said.
Among the alleged defamatory statements about Mr. Bacon, and blamed on Mr. Nygard and people connected with him, were that Mr. Bacon “murdered multiple individuals”; that “he is a white supremacist”; that he burned down Mr. Nygard’s house; and that “he has bribed Bahamian officials,” according to Mr. Bacon’s statement of claim.
The saga was featured in Vanity Fair in early 2016. It presented Mr. Nygard as a “hard-partying retail tycoon,” on an estate fit for a Mayan emperor, against a “buttoned-up hedge-fund king” who is passionate about conservation.
Later in the year, a New York judge threw out the defamation case on the grounds that it should be heard in the Bahamas. This spring, however, the case was revived in New York court on appeal.
The opposing legal teams met in a status conference with Justice Robert Kalish in September and are supposed to meet again on Nov. 1 as the case moves forward.
Mr. Nygard’s lawyers on Oct. 11 filed a motion to dismiss most of the lawsuit, which they called “an unwieldy pleading that is replete with overbroad allegations that detail every perceived slight over a seven-plus year period whether actionable or not, or stated by Nygard or not.”
A spokesperson for Mr. Bacon declined comment.
Mr. Prober, the Winnipeg lawyer for Mr. Nygard, said an eventual settlement might be the best result but added: “I don’t think Bacon is ready to come to the table.”
Back in the Bahamas, paradise has been tainted for the wealthy neighbours. Mr. Bacon is worth a reported US$1.6-billion and Mr. Nygard’s wealth, as of 2015, was valued at about $860-million. The men do not often visit the island.
On Monday, Fred Smith, a lawyer representing Save The Bays, will be in court alongside the country’s government, taking on Mr. Nygard’s legal team’s quest to overturn the seizure of his house.
Beyond the result of the Monday hearing, Mr. Smith predicted Mr. Nygard will struggle to redevelop his property. His push to obtain a permit has been tied up in the dredging cases. Mr. Nygard’s lawyers believe a permit will be forthcoming.
Mr. Smith disagreed.
“After five different Supreme Court trials and judgments, one of which contains basically a perpetual prohibition against Mr. Nygard receiving any permit to do anything on Nygard Cay, he’s going to be climbing Mount Olympus without any oxygen.”