Opinion ID: 789756
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Pervasive use of code words for Cuba

Text: 144 A number of former employees of The Bro-Tech Corporation testified that they understood, at the time of their employment during the relevant time period, that terms like the Caribbean, the island and that island were used to refer to Cuba. Specifically, Mr. Grossman testified that Caribbean island was kind of a code word for Cuba after Deloitte and Touche's findings in early 1993, A. 725 (Grossman, direct), and that Caribbean meant Cuba. Id. at 728. Mr. Sabzali's secretary in the Bala Cynwyd office from 1996 to early 1998 testified that she recalled two conversations with Mr. Sabzali regarding Cuba, one of which she described as a sort of smiling conversation where he said, we refer to it as the island, not by its formal name. A. 1302 (Lenton, direct). Ms. Graves, a former customer services employee in charge of processing sales orders for The Purolite Company at the Bala Cynwyd office from approximately 1995 until her retirement in January 1999, testified that she and her counterpart in the Canada office would frequently talk about shipments to Cuba, but specified that in so doing, [w]e didn't refer to them as shipments to Cuba, but ... as shipments to that island. A. 880 (Graves, direct). Mr. Nace testified that he had told Mr. Sabzali that he was uncomfortable receiving faxes from Sabzali openly referring to Cuba and as a result, Mr. Sabzali referred to Cuba, at least in dealings with Mr. Nace, as the Caribbean. Mr. Carlos Lugo, who operated as a salesman of The Purolite Company in Mexico from May 1996 to 2000, 22 testified with reference to an expense report that he had turned in to the Bala Cywyd office related to travel through January 1998 that Mr. Ed Grossman called me and said to me that that report had to be redone because I stated that I was going to Havana and the name Havana could not be in the report. A. 601 (Lugo, direct). There was also testimony that words like Havana and Cuba were sometimes used rather openly in transaction and expense-related documentation.