Reference no: EM133194763 , Length: 3 pages
Your mission, as before, is to identify 5 legal issues. Think of this again as a "Where's Waldo" challenge where your job is to find genuine legal issues.
This Assignment follows a fact pattern similar to the last one, but it is not the same.
PART A - IDENTIFICATION
First, identify all of the legal issues in this scenario. This can be done in bullet form. Correctly identifying all of the legal issues is worth 50% of the assignment
PART B- DISCUSSION
Next, discuss each legal issue in greater depth. Keep your explanations to a couple of lines or so.
Format - Keep your answers brief. Point form is fine but not required.
Case Scenario
Fish and Asparagus Ltd. ("FASL") is a federally incorporated business that operates a restaurant in each of Ottawa, Toronto, and Kitchener, Ontario. It also sells frozen dinners to grocery chains across Canada. The frozen dinners are produced at its facility in Burlington Ontario.
The pandemic has been very difficult on the 3 restaurants in Ottawa, Toronto and Kitchener. But the frozen dinner business has picked up a lot during the pandemic.
It has been a tough year for the corporation on the whole. Aside from the pandemic, an employee who recently quit has stolen its secret recipe for its famous fish and asparagus meal and is refusing to return it unless he is paid $500,000. He says the confidentiality agreement he signed is null and void because he helped develop the recipe while on the job. He says he will give it to a competitor unless he is paid.
Another frozen food manufacturer has started using a logo that looks very much like FASL's except instead of a grey fish topped with asparagus, the competitor's logo is a grey fish topped with green beans.
As if that were not enough, FASL had entered into an agreement of purchase and sale to sell a building it owned in Windsor Ontario, but the buyer refused to close the transaction. The buyer insisted that the sale was intended to include ovens (value $75,000), freezers (valued at $60,000) and other equipment (leased from a third party) that FASL wanted to move to is Burlington facility to increase frozen food production there. None of this equipment is listed in the agreement, but the ovens are built into the walls. The sale price was $1.2 million, and FASL was counting on the sale proceeds to give it some cash flow and pay off its $800,000 mortgage on the property. The mortgage is raining cash flow.
The restaurants have lost over $ 7 million since March 2020, but the frozen dinner line has generated a profit of $2.5 million. However, FASL owes $10 million to creditors and its only asset is the building in Windsor plus $200,000 in the bank.
The CEO and CFO think they can salvage the business if they close the restaurants, sell the Windsor building and focus on the frozen dinner businesspeople employed in the Burlington production facility and the plan is to keep them working since the facility is profitable.