Court Documents Detailing Transperfect (Translations.com) Co-CEO frequent harassment of the company a treasurer. A long-tenured employee of the company and survivor of a stroke, was the subject of frequent harassment, being locked out of her own office, and the recipient egregious instances of angry and erratic behavior on a frequent basis. So much so that the head of Human Resources resigned from his position from being unable to help. Source of document here: https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/fbem/DocumentDisplayServlet?documentId=dvVYVVZMVZBLgtyOJOZ41w==&system=pro

1. 4. Elting does not bring these claims lightly. She tried for months to avoid litigation,
but by early May 2014, that was no longer possible. Elting commenced this action on May 7,
within 24 hours after Shawe, believed to be acting in concert with Yu-Kai Ng ("Ng"),
TransPerfect's Chief Information Officer, disabled Gale Boodram, TransPerfect's long-time
Treasurer ("Boodram"), from being able to log into the company's computer network. That in
turn prevented TransPerfect from paying bonuses and commissions to hundreds of production
and sales staff employees that were about to be overdue. Within a matter of days, it also would
have prevented TransPerfect from processing the payroll and sending paychecks to its thousands
of domestic employees.
5. To avert that crisis, Elting sought and obtained a Temporary Restraining Order
that accomplished three things: (i) Shawe was restrained from preventing or interfering with the
administration of TransPerfect's payroll; (ii) Shawe was forbidden to change or restrict anyone's
access to TransPerfect's computer systems and/or network; and (iii) Shawe was restrained from
communicating "in any fashion whatsoever with Gale Boodram." (May 8, 2014 Order) (Ex. 66).
The Court required Shawe to reinstate Boodram's access to the computer system, even before the
hearing had ended. (Ex. 65 at 11-12).
6. As set forth in detail below, Shawe's erratic and abusive behavior leading to this
lawsuit and that emergency motion have included the following:
• With respect to payroll, in March 2014, Shawe broke more than twenty years of
TransPerfect company policy requiring Elting and Shawe to mutually approve
raises and bonuses. Instead, Shawe secretly attempted to install raises and
bonuses unilaterally while Elting was travelling in Asia and against her direct
instruction. He accomplished this, temporarily, by surreptitiously enlisting Ng
and several other employees to participate in his scheme, and blocking ADP's
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2. ability to e-mail TransPerfect with questions. In doing so, Shawe ordered Ng to
"take [Boodram] out of adp [a]nd kill her phone." (Ex. 41). When ADP received
no response to its e-mails and attempted to call Boodram — its long-time primary
contact who has been responsible for administering TransPerfect's payroll for
roughly fifteen years — Shawe misdirected ADP's calls away from her. When
Elting later asked for an investigation of the entire incident by TransPerfect's
head of Human Resources, Shawe prevented the investigation from occurring.
And when Elting asked HR to at least inform the employees that their pay was
being impacted, Shawe told the head of HR: "Put your pencil down on drafting a
lie for Liz about her gale and this payroll situation. Do not give her anything or
work at all with her on this." (Ex. 20).
• When Elting returned, she reversed Shawe's surreptitious raises and bonuses,
including correcting more than a dozen errors in employees' paychecks that
occurred because Shawe did not know how properly to administer the payroll.
Ultimately faced with conflicting instructions, ADP advised TransPerfect that
absent a written agreement between Elting and Shawe providing a unified
directive to ADP, which Shawe refused to provide, ADP would no longer process
its payroll. Because of Shawe's refusal to enter into a joint written directive,
TransPerfect was on the brink of being unable to pay its approximately 2,000
domestic employees. It was only by virtue of the Temporary Restraining Order,
which defendant only reluctantly obeyed, that this catastrophe was averted.
• Because of Ng's role in causing the unauthorized payroll, his access to ADP was
taken away in March. Ng, acting at Shawe's direction, then refused to prepare a
critical report that is needed to pay quarterly bonuses to TransPerfect's production
staff for the first quarter of 2014. To make matters worse, on May 6 or 7, Shawe
disabled Boodram's access to TransPerfect's computer system. (Ex. 58).
Without access to the system, Boodram could not work on the payroll. Even
more immediately, unless and until Boodram could access the system,
TransPerfect could not pay the first quarter production commissions, or the April
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3. sales commissions; the former were already overdue and the latter had to be
processed by Friday, May 9 to be paid on time.
• Shawe's payroll misconduct has not been limited to ADP. When ADP would no
longer follow his unilateral instructions, he secretly attempted to move
TransPerfect's entire payroll to Paychex, Inc., without advising Elting. When
Elting learned of this, she was forced to write to senior executives at Paychex
(including its CEO and Chief Legal Officer) to ensure that Shawe's attempts to
hijack the payroll would not succeed.
• Shawe's abuse of Boodram also must end before it becomes even more
dangerous. Boodram has been a loyal and honest employee for more than
fourteen years. A middle-aged woman and a native of Trinidad who suffered a
stroke about ten years ago, Boodram has been victimized by Shawe's bullying for
more than eight months, to the point where she is receiving medical treatment.
Though she has done nothing but perform her duties, Shawe has publicly and
falsely accused Boodram of "deceit," "collusion," taking "bribes,"
"embezz[ling]," and being a "thief." He has variously shut off her phone, locked
her out of her office, confiscated her computer and, most recently, taken away her
network access. The abuse has been so out of control that Robert DeNoia,
TransPerfect's long-time head of Human Resources, finally resigned because he
was unable to stop Shawe. The following widely-disseminated e-mail (Ex. 1),
which Shawe sent to Boodram for the "offense" of doing her job and processing
payroll, is typical:
You know you were not supposed to do this...and you
intentionally fucking did it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
DO YOU UNDERSTAND THIS YOU CRAZY
PERSON.
THIS IS MY GODDAMN MONEY, MY
COMPANY, AND YOU REPORT HALF TO ME...
Perhaps your shrink will have a position for you,
because TransPerfect isn't going to.
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4. This payroll fuck up is the last straw.
• Other recent erratic behavior from Shawe has caused problems with Signature
Bank, TransPerfect's bank for many years. When Elting told Shawe that she
would take care of paying her own income taxes, Shawe first said, on April 2, that
he would pay Elting's taxes himself no earlier than April 10, then paid them
against Elting's instructions on April 3 with post-dated checks, and tried to stop
payment on the checks that Elting used to pay her own taxes. During this
episode, Shawe also blocked the bank's emails from reaching TransPerfect.
Shawe made the unauthorized, post-dated tax payments (and another unauthorized
payment) with checks he secretly took from TransPerfect's registry (causing
Elting's taxes to be paid twice), and did not enter into the system until weeks after
the fact. All of this caused understandable consternation with Signature Bank,
which called the parties and their counsel in for a meeting during which it asked
for this type of behavior to end.
7. These are just a few recent examples of Shawe's erratic behavior. His misconduct
also includes barging into Elting's office on May 7 and refusing to leave until Elting threatened
to call the police, using TransPerfect's outside counsel to advise him on a failed scheme to trick
Boodram into providing him personally with a release, stealing and opening Elting's personal
mail, refusing to permit any income distributions despite repeated agreements to do so, stealing
Elting's code that allows her to contribute to the TransPerfect Facebook page, and recently
sending a 1:00 a.m. e-mail to a vast array of TransPerfect employees after a night of drinking and
then the next day saying "it sounded like me," but claiming that someone broke into his
computer and sent it. He also has been accused on more than one occasion of drinking to excess
at company functions and making unwanted sexual advances on female employees. Other
examples of Shawe's misconduct are set forth below but, in essence, they have caused near
paralysis inside the TransPerfect headquarters, and have prejudiced the company's relationships
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5. with its outside lawyers, bankers, accountants, publicists and payroll administrators, among
others.
8. With the restraining order in place, the payroll crisis has been at least temporarily
solved and TransPerfect is able, for now, to pay its employees. But in all other respects,
TransPerfect remains in a state of utter dysfunction, Elting and Shawe are irreconcilably
deadlocked, and Shawe's misconduct continues to harm TransPerfect. Shawe should be
removed as an officer and director of TransPerfect, for cause; TransPerfect should be dissolved
based on deadlock; and the Court should award compensatory and punitive damages for Shawe's
bad faith breaches of his fiduciary duties.
The Parties
9. Elting is the co-founder, Co-CEO and one of two directors of TransPerfect.
Elting resides in New York County.
10. Shawe is the other co-founder, Co-CEO and director of TransPerfect. Shawe
resides in New York County.
11. Nominal defendant TransPerfect is a New York corporation with its principal
place of business at Three Park Avenue, New York, New York.
12. Nominal defendant TPG, a Delaware holding company authorized to do business
in New York, is the 100 percent owner of TransPerfect. Elting owns 50 percent of the shares of
TPG, Shawe owns 49 percent, and Shawe's mother, Shirley Shawe, owns the remaining one
percent.
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