A jury trial began Wednesday in Dallas County District Court in a lawsuit brought by the former head of U.S. operations for a German oil and gas concern who claims he was fired without cause in 2023, in violation of his written employment contract.
Bernard Tubeileh, a German national, is seeking unspecified damages of more than $1 million from two U.S. subsidies of Global Oil & Gas AG, a company he co-founded in 2006 in Walldorf, Germany.
His suit says the American companies owe him millions of dollars, including unpaid compensation he was promised in writing and a share of revenues generated by producing wells in which he’d been granted an interest. The suit also said that since his ouster one of the Global subsidies has stopped making its monthly payments on $2.2 million in loans from him and a financial institution he’s affiliated with — loans the other subsidiary guaranteed.
Tubeileh (pronounced TUBE-uh-lay) sued Global’s two American subsidiaries — but not their German parent company — in Dallas County on June 6, 2023, a month after he was forced out. The U.S. entities, Global Oil & Gas Texas and Global Oil & Gas Fields Oklahoma, both with offices in Plano, filed a counterclaim on Aug. 18, 2023, accusing him of fraud and misappropriating company funds.
The complaints are being tried before state District Judge Martin Hoffman.
Tubeileh’s suit claims that thanks to his expertise and hard work Global hit paydirt on a number of oil and gas deals in the States, making the company’s American subsidiaries “successful and profitable companies, with assets valued at approximately $300 million.”
The Global subsidiaries’ counterclaim says Tubeileh wasn’t fired; he “resigned” after an internal investigation by Global revealed that he’d stolen “tens of millions of dollars” from the companies through “various fraudulent schemes” intended to mask “a web of self-dealing and unlawful transactions.”
The Global companies’ lawyer, Michael Hurst of Lynn Pinker Hurst & Schwegmann in Dallas, told jurors in his opening statement Wednesday that Tubeileh’s conduct could be summed up by “three D’s,” as he wrote with a marker on a large paper easel: Deception, Disloyalty and Defrauding.
Tubeileh’s lawyer, Brian Lauten of Dallas, told the jurors to disregard Hurst’s D’s. In his opening statement, he characterized his client as an honest, hardworking, talented and kindly executive.
After Tubeileh uprooted his German family and moved to the United States — first Tulsa, then Southlake — “he was out on an oil rig every day getting his hands dirty” trying to make Global’s exploration and production ventures successful.
“Any person who knows this man is not going to call him a crook,” Lauten said. He told the jurors that employees who worked for Tubeileh at the Global subsidiaries, including accountants who kept a close eye on the books, will testify that they never saw any evidence that he engaged in financial impropriety — or any other kind of impropriety.
After they hear his first few witnesses extol Tubeileh’s character and veracity, Lauten said, “if we don’t tear their case apart, hold it against me.”
The trial is expected to take weeks. Judge Hoffman told the newly seated jurors Wednesday that the case will involve numerous witnesses, voluminous exhibits and a lengthy jury charge.
Hurst, the Global subsidiaries’ lawyer, said evidence will show that Tubeileh devised varied and audacious schemes to enrich himself by stealing from his employers. He said an expert witness will testify that the Global companies lost $78 million as a result of Tubeileh’s shady actions.
For example, Hurst said, Tubeileh arranged for the Global subsidiaries to pay millions of dollars in consulting fees to a shell company, Jamalabox, that Tubeileh was secretly behind. Hurst said testimony will show that Jamalabox, ostensibly a business established by a fellow oilman to import soaps manufactured by relatives of Tubeileh in the Middle East, imported no soap, had no employees except its “manager,” Tubeileh’s oilfield friend, and did no consulting for the Global companies or anyone else.
Jamalabox’s sole function, Hurst said, was to collect sham consulting fees from the Global companies, payments arranged by Tubeileh, and transfer the money to a German financial institution, Sinotar Investments, which, according to Global’s counterclaim, was wholly owned by Tubeileh.
“It was his personal piggy bank,” Hurst said. Tubeileh, he said, spent much of the ill-gotten fortune on himself and his family — for example, to put down an offer on a home and to pay his children’s private-school tuition.
Much of the rest, Hurst said, Sinotar loaned back to Global’s U.S. subsidiaries — from whom the money was stolen in there first place — at exorbitant interest rates.
Tubeileh “repeatedly pressured the Global U.S. subsidiaries to take out high-rate loans from his alter ego Sinotaur, without full disclosure of his conflict of interest,” the companies’ counterclaim said.
The case number is DC-23-07534.