- 8 - to extinguish the debt for either Hamseh or Desert Spice. According to Murphy, he and Hunt modified their sales contracts for Hamseh and Desert Spice to use the cash-in-hand from the insurance settlement to pay much of the unpaid interest on those horses. The debt was finally extinguished--and the notes marked “paid in full”--only years later, when Murphy agreed to turn over to Hunt one foal each from Hamseh and Desert Spice. In addition to his testimony, Murphy produced a written agreement with Hunt ratifying the continuing existence of his obligation to pay the outstanding principal for On the Piste. In judging the credibility of this story, we wondered what was in it for Hunt--if Murphy is to be believed, by the time he bought On the Piste in mid-1997, he was still in debt to Hunt on the other two horses for hundreds of thousands of dollars. If Murphy was truly delinquent in his payments to Hunt, why would Hunt continue to “whip and dip” by selling On the Piste to him? Why is there no rock-solid contemporaneous documentation regarding the many extensions, modifications, etc. of the note payments that were to have occurred? It would also have been easy, one might think, for one party or the other to have introduced Murphy’s check registers and bank statements for 1994-97 to see the extent to which the debts on Hamseh and Desert Spice had been paid. But neither party did, despite Murphy’s having turned all these records over to the IRSPage: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Next
Last modified: May 25, 2011