Friday, February 20, 2015

Donor's Lawyers File Complaint Against USA Judo

Thought this was interesting ... 

The lawyers for Lynn Thursby-Wooldridge filed a complaint against USA Judo. Most interesting to me was that the complaint came from someone who had donated $90,000 to USA Judo, loaned them $100,000 and was in the process of considering another loan for $500,000 and came to have serious concerns once she received the financial statements requested as a basis for deciding on the loan.

Also particularly interesting to me was that the USA Judo Executive Director, Jose Rodriguez is accused of several conflicts of interest. Among other things, it sounds like he bought judo gis from USA Judo and then sold them at a profit to the Panamerican Judo Confederation, keeping the profits for himself. Interestingly, he has positions with both USA Judo and the PJC.

" This Complaint centers on serious issues of financial mismanagement, self-dealing, and conflicts of interest, raised by a large supporter of the sport of judo who has also been a donor to the organization. Claimant does not bring this Complaint lightly, however, USA Judo (hereinafter “USAJ”) has had over nine months to address the problems that Claimant raised as early as April 2014. Unfortunately, rather than correcting the problems, USAJ hired an independent consultant with minimal financial expertise, who after ostensibly investigating for several months, offered weak and essentially useless recommendations."


 You can download the whole 45-page complaint here.

3 comments:

Stephen said...

That was very interesting.

Glad I'm not one of the lawyers in that mess.

Anonymous said...

Wow! I wish you all would make a judouniversity.com like gracieuniversity.com. I encourage you to check out their link, if you haven't already, when you get time. I really enjoyed your book, and I honestly believe if the Gracie family could set up a learning university for their martial arts program, so could you and your family. I don't know if online systems would weed out all the corruption, but I like to think it would be a start. I know if you all set up a martial arts school online, I would most definitely subscribe. Thanks for sharing. I had no clue this was going on.

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