It’s a vintage lawsuit. Online retailer Wine.com is suing Baker Capital, claiming the New York-based venture capital firm turned down a $67.5 million buyout bid from Liberty Media Corp. for the firm’s own benefit. VentureWire reports that Wine.com is charging in a suit filed in San Francisco Superior Court that Baker Capital offered the nearly bankrupt retailer $10 million in additional funding so that the VC firm could raise its voting stake from 40% to 70% – and which lowered the value the company to about 20% to 50% of that established by the Liberty offer. “They used their position to better themselves at the expense of everyone else,” former Wine.com CEO George Garrick, who suggested Baker cooked up the plan in order to buy the online retailer cheap.
Attorney Mitch Karlan of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, who represents Baker, in dubbing the lawsuit “utterly baseless,” said in an interview with VentureWire that the Liberty offer was “not real” and that it had been downsized from $75 million. Karlan said his client passed on the deal because it “was not consistent with their fiduciary duties to their fund investors.”