The brother of Gravity Payments CEO Dan Price, who announced a $70,000 minimum salary for all employees earlier this year, is suing him for violating his rights as a minority shareholder, King County Superior Court records revealed this week.
Dan Price is being sued by Lucas Price, the company's cofounder and director, for allegedly breaching duties and contracts along with violating
minority shareholder rights, the Seattle Times reported.
This is not the first time the company has been a victim of family infighting. In 2004, the Price brothers founded the merchant services company Price & Price but disagreements led to a restructuring, the Times noted. The new company, Gravity Payments, emerged from the restructuring in 2008.
"It was an aggregation of events over the course of years," Greg Hollon, who is representing Lucas Price, told the Seattle Times of the suit.
Dan Price announced in April that he would raise the minimum annual wage of Gravity Payments employees to $70,000 over the
next three years, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal. Price reportedly planned to reduce his own salary from $1 million to $70,000 annually to pay for the increase, which would affect about 70 of the company's 120 employees.
Dan Price had also planned to use two-thirds of the company's $2.2 million in expected profits to cover the raises as well, the Business Journal noted.
"The market rate for me as a CEO compared to a regular person is ridiculous,
it's absurd," Dan Price told The New York Times in April. "As much as I'm a capitalist, there is nothing in the market that is making me do it."
Lucas Price charged in the lawsuit that Dan Price excessively paid himself and deprived him of his minority-shareholder benefits, according to the Seattle Times. Hollon told the newspaper that the decision to pay employees $70,000 is not directly tied to the lawsuit.
According to court documents, Lucas Price wants the court to order Gravity to repurchase his shares and to give him an accounting of its transactions, financial affairs, and financial records.
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