MIAMI - A federal judge has ruled that issues raised in a lawsuit by a medical school in the Caribbean nation of Curacao should be resolved in that country rather than in the United States.
St. Martinus University sued Caribbean Health Holdings, LLC in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. The suit alleged that Caribbean Health misdirected funds due to the university from U.S. federal student loan programs and fabricated promissory notes of loans to the private school.
Other suits between the parties were filed in Curaçao.
U.S. District Court judge Cecilia M. Altonaga ruled that Curacao is the best place to resolve the dispute.
“The Court has reviewed Plaintiff’s allegations and the records from the Curaçaoan lawsuits at length,” the judge wrote. “Having done so, the Court finds most of Plaintiff’s allegations are virtually identical to those put before the Curaçao courts, and the remainder are either entangled with ongoing proceedings in Curaçao or additional proceedings that Plaintiff may bring there. This case is, at its core, a Curaçaoan dispute and should continue to be litigated there.”
St. Martinus had alleged in its U.S. lawsuit that it was hampered by the Curaçao court’s procedural rules that would not allow it to conduct discovery on the legitimacy of the promissory notes or the bank accounts where the loan money was allegedly deposited.
But Altonaga disagreed.
“There is no reason to question the competence of the Curaçaoan judicial system merely because its evidentiary, discovery, or procedural rules differ from those in the United States,” she ruled. “Certainly, neither should Plaintiff, because the Curaçaoan Plaintiff itself initiated the 2015 lawsuit in its home country.”
The lawsuits in Curacao have been pending longer than the U.S. suit, the judge noted.
“The Court finds it would be largely inconvenient to prosecute a new case here, at the behest of a Curaçaoan Plaintiff seeking to litigate claims and issues involving Curaçaoan law, previously presented to and resolved by the Curaçaoan courts, and some awaiting resolution on appeal,” she wrote.
St. Martinus University N.V., v. Caribbean Health Holding, LLC. U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida, 1:19-cv-22278