T-Mobile seeks to keep a letter hidden in a case claiming it ripped off minority TPR store owners
PhoneArena has seen a letter mailed to the judge overseeing a lawsuit that we wrote about last year. In a nutshell, T-Mobile was accused of teaming up with the third-largest authorized T-Mobile retailer, Arch Telecom, to close minority-owned T-Mobile locations. The original court filing said, "Arch Telecom attempts to close the Plaintiffs' stores for absolutely zero compensation, depriving them of their livelihood and disgorging them of their investments."
The plaintiffs in the case are the minority owners of third-party T-Mobile stores serving small communities. T-Mobile controls just about every aspect of the plaintiffs' business. For example, when an Arch director acting on behalf of T-Mobile approached a minority store owner he told the store owner that he had "The option of either giving the store to Arch Telecom or simply being forced to close," according to court documents.
Currently, a major issue has developed over a two-page document that T-Mobile is trying to keep away from public eyes. As the letter written by the plaintiff to the judge says, "The Plaintiffs believe that T-Mobile, which is a publicly held company, is attempting to conceal this public and non-Confidential information regarding the closures." The two-page letter at issue is a missive from T-Mobile's Senior Director for Authorized Retailers Codey Welker to Arch Telecom dated August 4, 2022.
T-Mobile's reason for frantically seeking to keep this two-page letter out of the record is that it apparently contains some information that would be severely damaging to its case. And the carrier has supposedly asked the judge to seal the letter addressed to him that we mentioned at the beginning of this article. The case, being heard in New York State Supreme Court Nassau County, is known as 170 East v. T-Mobile, designated as Case No. 610050-23.
Considering that the suit revolves around minority owners of third-party T-Mobile retail locations who claim that T-Mobile and Arch Telecom conspired to take control of these stores, it is interesting that the letter T-Mobile is seeking to keep from the public's eyes includes a reference to a conversation between T-Mobile's Welker and Arch Telecom.
T-Mobile allegedly required the Plaintiffs to renovate their stores and renew leases without telling them that the sub-dealer program they were part of was going to be terminated. Arch released the termination dates of these stores to the Plaintiffs with T-Mobile's knowledge. Since these dates were earlier than the termination dates set by T-Mobile, owners of these community stores felt that their locations were in imminent danger of being shut down. As a result, the owners of these stores felt that they had no choice but to sell out to Arch at a big discount.
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