Claremont
“To date we believe all the consumer liens have been paid off,” said Emelia Galdieri, an attorney with the New Hampshire Banking Department, which brought the action against Schiltkamp last year.
Schiltkamp faced a Tuesday deadline to pay off the liens, in addition to paying a $265,000 administrative fine imposed by the banking department for failure to comply with previous orders and deadlines relating to the unpaid liens.
Claremont Ford Lincoln customers were left holding the bag on the unpaid balance of the loans on the cars they had traded in to the dealership when purchasing new vehicles, placing them in financial difficulty and in jeopardy with credit rating agencies, according to the banking department.
“There were a lot of customers that got really hurt,” Schiltkamp said in a telephone interview on Friday. “But we’ve rectified it. Everyone is paid and their credit agencies have been contacted and told it is not their fault and they had nothing to do with it, so please correct their credit score.”
Schiltkamp said he has also paid the back wages of dealership employees who went without a paycheck the final weeks of business as the company’s financial situation deteriorated.
The dealership’s failure to pay liens on trade-in vehicles first surfaced in 2009, when state regulators began to receive complaints from customers who reported they were receiving notices from lenders that they were behind on car loan payments they assumed had been paid by Claremont Ford after they traded in their vehicle on a new purchase.
The problems surfaced again in 2015, when state regulators received more complaints from customers.
An investigation by the banking department found that Schiltkamp’s Claremont dealership had failed to pay off liens on more than 100 trade-in vehicles going back to 2010 within the 21 days required by law, and that 28 of those liens remained outstanding. It found a similar problem at Schiltkamp’s Suzuki dealership in Manchester, which also closed last year.
The banking department suspended Claremont Ford’s retail license in May, which ended the dealership’s ability to sell vehicles using in-house financing. Ford Motor Co. then took the dealership to court in June to seize $3.2 million in vehicle inventory, which was removed from the lot in July. Claremont Ford’s service department remained open a few months longer before closing in September.
Against the backdrop of state sanctions against Schiltkamp, the former automobile dealer has turned around to lay the blame for the failure of his New Hampshire automobile dealerships on the former chief operating officer of those businesses. Schiltkamp is suing Dennis J. Griffin, of Croydon, who was also the chief financial officer of the dealerships, alleging that Griffin engaged in financial self-dealing and other mismanagement while running Schiltkamp’s New Hampshire dealerships.
Schiltkamp, in the interview, declined to discuss specifics about the lawsuit or the problems with liens, other than to say “I had people with the best of intentions who did things they shouldn’t have done.”
The lawsuit brought by Schiltkamp against Griffin, filed in Hillsborough Superior Court Northern District in Manchester, reveals a financially troubled company that was losing money and required repeated loans by Schiltkamp to keep the businesses afloat. The lawsuit says Schiltkamp eventually loaned the dealerships a total of nearly $5 million out of his own funds to cover operating expenses.
Although the lawsuit does not allege Griffin had a role in the unpaid liens — the lawsuit never mentions the problem with the liens or the banking department’s actions and Schiltkamp never reported Griffin’s alleged theft to authorities — it nonetheless details the longtime poor financial performance of Schiltkamp’s dealerships, which the lawsuit says led Schiltkamp to lose $10 million over a 14-year period.
Among the allegations that Schiltkamp levels against Griffin, in addition to mismanaging the business, is that Griffin handed himself an unauthorized 200 percent raise in pay, was absent much of the time from the job, and “siphoned funds” for “personal interest.”
Through his attorney, Griffin, who left the company in 2014, denied the allegations.
“Mr. Schiltkamp’s allegations against Dennis Griffin are without merit and untrue,” Neil Nicholson, a Concord-based attorney for Griffin, said in an email. “Mr. Griffin worked tirelessly for Mr. Schiltkamp for over a decade. Mr. Griffin denies any wrongdoing and will continue to pursue his counterclaim against Mr. Schiltkamp.”
In his counterclaims, Griffin is seeking to force Schiltkamp to reimburse nearly $48,000 in expenses on Griffin’s company credit cards that he said include charges made by Schiltkamp and other employees, but for which Griffin is personally liable, as well as for disbursements he says are due him from his share in a reinsurance company that he jointly owns with Schiltkamp.
Griffin is also seeking to have the lawsuit dismissed, arguing the allegations fall outside the three-year statute of limitations. A hearing on the dismissal motion is scheduled for next month in the Hillsborough Court in Manchester.
Schiltkamp’s New Hampshire automobile dealerships were part of the New York City-based consultant and investor’s far-flung business interests, which at various times have included a stake in a Cayman Islands-based private bank called ATC Trustees, Planet Fitness franchises, a telecommunications firm in Paraguay, automobile exporting to China, and serving as a producer of low-budget horror movies.
Schiltkamp’s pay-off of the liens of customers of his Claremont dealership may not spell the end of his legal and financial troubles.
Schiltkamp’s attorneys, in calling for a postponement last fall of a hearing before banking department officials, cited as one of the reasons their belief that a criminal grand jury was investigating Schiltkamp, arguing that their client would not be able to defend himself “while under the cloud of an ongoing grand jury investigation.”
The current status of the grand jury investigation could not be independently determined.
Marc Hathaway, the county attorney for Sullivan County, said he could not confirm or deny whether a grand jury has been impaneled to investigate Schiltkamp’s business dealings. In New Hampshire, grand juries typically originate at the county level.
Schiltkamp, who lives in New York City, has strong ties to the Upper Valley. Besides a residence on Gates Road in Etna, both of Schiltkamp’s children attended Kimball Union Academy in Meriden, where Schiltkamp’s wife, Robin Schiltkamp, is a former member of the board of trustees and the school’s 14,000-volume library, The Jacob A. Schiltkamp Library, is named in honor of his father, according to KUA’s website.
Schiltkamp, in the interview, said that he was forced to resort to selling personal assets in order to pay off the liens, fines and make restitution to former employees for back pay. He has had his townhouse in New York City on the market since last year, initially listing it for $29 million but recently knocking it down to $21.9 million, according to real estate websites.
John Lippman can be reached at 603-727-3219, or jlippman@vnews.com.
