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Updated 46 minutes ago
The Pennsylvania Superior Court on Tuesday upheld a lower court's ruling that would require Trib Total Media to disclose more than two decades' worth of financial records in a civil dispute filed by attorneys representing the son and daughter of the newspaper's late publisher, Dick Scaife.
Jennie Scaife of Palm Beach, Fla., and David Scaife of Shadyside are suing trustees who managed a fund their father used to support and grow companies under Trib Total Media.
The siblings allege that they would have inherited money from that fund if the trustees had prevented the publisher from spending all of it before he died in July 2014.
The trustees involved are former Trib board of directors Chairman H. Yale Gutnik and Scaife relative James Walton.
Attorneys for Trib Total Media, according to court filings, said disclosing the financial records would “cause extreme burden, expense, and annoyance to TTM — to say nothing of the embarrassment of having the entirety of its financial and business records, including documents relating to losses to TTM, spanning more than two decades, made available to the parties of a civil action to which TTM itself is not even a party.”
The company's attorneys also contend that the records, if they fell into the wrong hands, could reveal trade secrets that competitors could use to their advantage.
A Superior Court panel of three judges — President Judge Emeritus John T. Bender, Senior Judge John L. Musmanno and Judge Lillian Harris Ransom — issued the “non-precedential” ruling, meaning it won't influence future court decisions that involve similar matters.
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