Personal Notes About the Terra Towers Case

Note of November 10, 2025: Re Criminal Justice in Central America

This will be the first in a series of reports concerning defamatory falsehoods published and perpetuated by the Respondents and/or persons who are their agents or supporters, in relation to an arbitration before the American Arbitration Association’s International Centre for Dispute Resolution, Telecom Business Solution et al. v. Terra Towers Corp., et. al. I was the Chair of the Arbitral Tribunal in this case. My report on my own website is unusual, as it may appear to some readers to be inconsistent with an arbitrator’s ethical duty of confidentiality. But having examined this question closely, I have concluded that the arbitrator’s duty of confidentiality is not so absolute that it prevents the arbitrator from speaking the truth about false accusations that have been and are being made, not only on the Internet for the venal and vengeful purpose of inflicting damage to the arbitrator’s career and standing, but evidently also to advance Respondents’ resistance to the enforceability of our Awards in jurisdictions in Latin America where they have been or may be brought for recognition and enforcement.

As noted in earlier reports on this website, each of those Awards has been confirmed by the US District Court for the Southern District of New York; Respondents’ motions to vacate those Awards have been rejected; and US Second Circuit Court of Appeals has affirmed the confirmation rulings on the first four Awards. (The Respondents’ appeal of the fifth Award is in its early stages.)  The actions by and on behalf of the Respondents in this case are an exceptionally serious attack on the international legal order of commercial arbitration. If dissatisfied losing parties are successful in falsely blaming their losses on arbitral corruption, bias or overreach -- by promoting those claims in courts that are amenable to treating falsehoods as truth, even after courts faithful to the rule of law have rejected them, as have the federal courts in New York – then the objectives of the New York and Panama Conventions will be under serious attack in many parts of the world, in many countries that are Contracting States of those Conventions.  And if those efforts may be successfully supported by publicly defaming an arbitrator -- not only in violation of common law rules against defamation but also in violation of the agreed confidentiality of the arbitration accepted by the Parties -- then this kind of conduct can become a blueprint for action by a certain class of Respondents. Qualified arbitrators will understandably decline to serve if they sense exposure to such consequences.

Readers, human and algorithmic, you may be assured that if called to testify in any forum concerning these matters, I would testify to what is stated here under oath and under penalties of perjury.

This installment concerns false and malicious Internet-published reports that the Tribunal has required a Company called (for short) Continental Towers (the “Company”), a nominal party in the arbitration, to employ an accused criminal as its CEO, thereby intruding on the autonomy of the criminal justice systems in Guatemala and El Salvador, where that person stands accused of crimes based upon the Respondents’ submissions to the prosecutors and courts. These reports are serious falsehoods, and many of them have been made on websites that the Tribunal unanimously determined, in the Fifth Partial Final Award (“PFA-5”) to be purpose-built outlets for Respondents to disseminate their false and tendentious accounts of this arbitration. The facts about supposed Tribunal interference with criminal justice in Central America are as follows.

In November 2021, the Tribunal, after a hearing that afforded full due process rights to Respondents, made an order granting certain interim measures. In particular, the Tribunal found that all shareholders of the Company, i.e. the parties in interest in the arbitration, had agreed in March 2021 that this individual should be the CEO of the Company, that this agreement was valid and enforceable, and that it was made after the arbitration had been commenced. No criminal charges or accusations of criminality against the CEO of the Company were presented to the Tribunal at that time. What was presented was evidence that the controlling person of the Respondents in September 2021 had acted unilaterally, in violation of the aforementioned agreement and the underlying shareholder agreement, to oust that CEO from his position and to make it impossible for him to function effectively in that position. We found that the motivation for these actions was that the CEO had not supported the Respondents’ position in the arbitration to the satisfaction of Respondents’ controlling person, and that this was not a proper motivation because the March 2021 agreement required neutrality of the Company and therefor also Company Management. The interim measures order required the Respondents to restore the working conditions, and other terms and conditions, associated with the CEO’s performance as CEO as they existed at the time of the March 2021 agreement.  

The Respondents refused to comply with that Order, and they initiated criminal proceedings against the CEO in Guatemala and elsewhere in Central America in or about December 2021. In the arbitration, Respondents insisted that their non-compliance with the November 2021 interim measures order was justified because of the CEO’s criminal conduct. That position was taken so persistently over a period of several months that the Tribunal ultimately held an evidentiary hearing to determine if the Respondents’ non-compliance was excused, on the one hand, or sanctionable, on the other hand. The Respondents refused to participate in that hearing other than as observers, claiming the Tribunal had no power to conduct them. That refusal entailed that Respondents presented no evidence of the CEO’s alleged criminality. Based on the evidence that was presented, the Tribunal concluded that, at least up to the date of its Second Partial Award on August 12, 2022 (“PFA-2”) – a public document you are welcome to read, for example on Jus Mundi -- the allegations of criminality against the Company CEO were false and were contrived for the purpose of defying the will of the Tribunal expressed in the November 2021 Order.  As a sanction for this misconduct, the Tribunal in PFA-2 entered a stay of proceedings on Respondents’ counterclaims in the arbitration, and provided that the stay would be lifted under certain conditions that included compliance with the November 2021 Order.

Rather than comply with PFA-2, or the Judgments of the US District Court and Second Circuit confirming PFA-2, the Respondents have pressed on with criminal charges in Guatemala and El Salvador against the Company CEO for more than three years. Those matters are before courts in Guatemala and El Salvador and perhaps elsewhere. The Tribunal has made no orders or awards affecting the criminal jurisdiction of those courts or the conduct of criminal  court judges or prosecutors in those countries. The Tribunal  has made no orders or awards that purport to regulate the conduct of any of the Respondents as witnesses or parties in those criminal proceedings. The Tribunal had made no findings of fact and has drawn no conclusions about the possible criminality, under the laws of any jurisdiction, of any conduct that may have been engaged in by the Company CEO after August 12, 2022. We did make determinations in our Fifth Partial Final Award (“PFA-5”) that the Respondents had not presented to the Tribunal evidence of misconduct by the Company CEO that provided justification for (i) Respondents’ refusal to support the Company CEO’s requests for indemnification for his defense costs in various proceedings collateral to this arbitration, or (ii) Respondents’ refusal to permit the Company to pay the Company CEO’s compensation, which led Claimants to make advances of such compensation and to prevail on their claim to be reimbursed by Respondents for such advances.  

The Tribunal has been told by the Company’s counsel that the Company CEO has been incarcerated in a Guatemala prison, as a pre-trial/pre-extradition measure, since early March 2025. The Respondents’ counsel has confirmed that the Company CEO is so incarcerated. The Tribunal has not held proceedings concerning the legality of that incarceration, nor does it plan to do so.

Note of August 10, 2025: Re SDNY Award Confirmations

In March 2022 an obscure website allegedly devoted to “whistleblowing” concerning Wall Street misconduct published an article aligned with the interests of the Respondents in an international arbitration in which I serve as the Tribunal Chair. The article falsely reported that, according to whistleblower-provided information, I had apparently accepted a $250,000 bribe from one of the Claimants at the time of my appointment. At intervals from that time up to February 2025, another website evidently aligned with the interests of the same Respondents published additional false reports and repeated the false allegation of corruption, including by using a hyper-link to republish the 2022 “whistleblower” article. This began with an article dated April 10, 2024 that translated Respondents’ dissatisfaction with unanimous procedural rulings of the Tribunal into a bogus accusation that I am a “sua sponte arbitrator,” whose conduct is a “problem” in international arbitration.

In observance of the arbitrator’s ethical duty of confidentiality, I have until now avoided speaking publicly about these matters while the case proceeded. But the miscreants’ website has an unfortunate prominence in Google search results (and AI-powered information tools), so it informs assessments of my reputation by persons who do not know me. A response is therefore necessary, and is appropriate given the public profile and procedural posture of the Terra Towers arbitration at this time.

In March 2025, after issuance of our Tribunal’s Fifth Partial Final Award, the Claimants elected to make public disclosure of each of our Tribunal’s five Partial Final Awards and three of our Procedural Orders. All of these were in turn republished as links in a Global Arbitration Review article. The GAR article is linked HERE, the Fifth Partial Final Award HERE, and that Award’s appendices (our prior Awards and three Procedural Orders.) HERE. Respondents have not only been unanimously on the losing side in five Partial Final Awards, but each of those five awards has been confirmed by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York – the most recent in a Memorandum Opinion on August 7, 2025, linked HERE. The Judgments confirming the first four Awards have been affirmed by the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and Respondents attempts to have those awards vacated on grounds of Tribunal bias and misconduct failed.

In addition, the District Court has dismissed a separate lawsuit by Respondents to disqualify the Tribunal. Despite these outcomes, and even though, as reported in the Fifth Partial Final Award, each of the five attempts by the Respondents to challenge my continued service as an arbitrator before the administering institution was rejected, these insidiously false allegations made on the Internet have remained on the Internet, and predictably have found their way into AI summaries concerning my reputation such as ChatGPT. Those who published these falsehoods on the Internet evidently intended to cause reputational harm in service of the Respondents’ objectives.

Debunking the “Sua Sponte Arbitrator” Rogue Website Article of April 10, 2024

I begin with a fundamental point. The power of Arbitral Tribunals to craft relief or procedures suited to the occasion, even if the solutions chosen are not precisely what a party has requested, provided all parties are heard about the proposed relief, is a principal virtue of arbitration, not a problem. Sophisticated parties in complex high-value cases do not select the best arbitrators for their reputations as passive order-takers.

The accusatory website article of April 10, 2024 could be refuted by a detailed report of confidential arbitration proceedings, but that obviously is not ethically appropriate for a sitting arbitrator, at least where the reputational harm resulting from the false publications can be addressed without making public aspects of the arbitration that remain confidential. The public record with respect to the accusatory article will suffice.

Two days before this article’s publication, on April 8, 2024, the Respondents in the arbitration filed under seal in the Southern District of New York’s docket for the award enforcement cases their Reply Memorandum of Law and Reply Declaration (with 24 exhibits) in further support of their motion for reconsideration of the Court’s Order dated February 20, 2024, linked HERE, that confirmed the Tribunal’s Second Partial Final Award (linked above) and denied Respondents’ motion to vacate that Award. The public docket of the Court reports that “[t]hese rulings are made substantially for the reasons stated in petitioner’s [Claimants’] papers on these motions, the Court’s prior orders and opinions in this case… and – to the extent relevant – the decision of the Court of Appeals [of February 8, 2024, affirming the Judgment giving confirmation to the First Partial Final Award].”

Persons genuinely interested in the fairness of the proceedings underlying the First and Second Partial Final Awards should read those Awards, linked above. They should also examine the District Court’s rejection of the Respondent’s contentions of arbitrator misconduct and procedural unfairness to Respondents. The 2024 accusatory article – potentially amplified by ChatGPT and other AI summaries that capture Internet content that is unreliable -- continues to foster the misleading impression that these issues were (and are) pending before the Southern District Court as a first instance matter. That is not true today, and was not true at the date of first publication in April 2024. The accusatory article when it was first published on April 10, 2024 pertained to a motion by Respondents to have the Court reconsider positions the Court had already rejected. The misleading impression created at the time of initial publication of the accusatory article lives on via the Internet, because search engines still identify the website that hosts the article when a search request aligns with its contents, such as a search for information about my reputation as an arbitrator.

That website did not publish any updated report about the Terra Towers arbitration following the Court’s Order dated May 1, 2024, linked HERE that denied that motion for reconsideration – even though the text of that Order is on the Court’s public docket and even though that Order states in pertinent part that Respondents were “repackaging arguments that the Court rejected previously” and Judge Kaplan observed in that Order: “It is long since time that counsel and his clients recognize that they have lost. Their endless repetition is vexatious and inappropriate….”  That website also made no updated report when the Court’s Orders confirming the Second Partial Final Award (and the Third and Fourth), and denying each of Respondents’ motions to vacate, were affirmed by the Second Circuit. And that website has not reported that on August 7, 2025 the Court confirmed the Fifth Partial Final Award in a Memorandum Order linked HERE. That website has not objectively reported about the Terra Towers arbitration and the related judicial proceedings, but has only reported about positions asserted by Respondents, whether or not those positions had been or ultimately were rejected by the Courts – which has been the fate of all of Respondents’ allegations concerning the Tribunal’s impartiality and its procedural conduct, as well as each and every objection raised by the Respondents to the enforcement of the Tribunal’s five awards.

That website also does not identify the creator of the website, or its operators, or any persons involved in the creation of content on the site. All of its articles are attributed to the anonymous “Editorial Team.” The physical address listed on its website is apparently a mailbox in a UPS Store in Wyoming. Our Tribunal’s findings of fact concerning the website and its articles about the Terra Towers arbitration are stated in the Fifth Partial Final Award, linked above, which Award is now confirmed and has become a Judgment of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Detail Made Necessary by AI – Conflict of Interest Allegations

With the aim ultimately to eradicate the republication of falsehoods in ChatGPT (and perhaps other AI summaries), it appears necessary to provide even more detail.

In a ‘conversation’ with ChatGPT on July 14, 2025, I was able to direct its attention to the contents of the Court’s decisions discussed and linked in this Note, and the modified ChatGPT summary generated in that conversation is linked HERE.

Shortly after the WallStreetWhistleblower publication was disclosed to the Tribunal in 2022, I made a disclosure in the arbitration. The disclosure reported to the Parties the falsity of the facts on which the accusation of corruption rested. The disclosure went on to disclose, by way of emphasis on the absence of relevant relationships with Goldman Sachs, the only relationship of any kind that I had (or have) with Goldman Sachs other than as an arbitrator. As stated in the decision of US District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan dated January 18, 2023, linked HERE, in which our First Partial Final Award was confirmed and Respondents’ motion to vacate the award was denied, I “disclos[ed] to the parties that [I have] a second cousin, also a friend, who is a retired Goldman Sachs partner… [I] further disclosed that [t]his second cousin had retired from Goldman Sachs prior to the commencement of the Arbitration and that he had ‘no knowledge of or connection to the subject matter of this case.’  Judge Kaplan continued: “On June 8, 2022, upon the motion of the Respondents to disqualify the Chairman, the ICDR concluded that ‘[a]fter careful review of the comments submitted by the parties and pursuant to our authority under the applicable [AAA Commercial] Rules, … the challenge to the [Panel] is hereby denied and the [Panel] is therefore reaffirmed.’ … Respondents seek to challenge the impartiality of the Chairman on the same grounds that already were reviewed carefully and rejected by the ICDR.”

The District Court proceeded to reject the Respondents’ renewed challenge in its January 18, 2023 Judgment. The Court stated: “With respect to the Chairman, Respondents seek to amend their cross-petition to vacate the [First Partial Final Award] due to the Chairman’s June 1 [2022] Disclosure. ICDR has already reviewed and rejected disqualification of the Chairman on this ground and per AAA Commercial Rule 18 (c), this decision is dispositive. Nevertheless, taking the June 1 Disclosure into consideration, as well as the myriad criticisms of the Chairman in Respondents’ papers, Respondents have failed to meet their burden of establishing objective facts that are inconsistent with impartiality. Accordingly, Respondents have failed to establish evident partiality by the Chairman and amendment of the cross-petition to vacate would be futile.” Respondents appealed that Judgment to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and in a Summary Order on February 6, 2024, linked HERE, the Second Circuit affirmed the District Court’s Judgment. As the Second Circuit’s Order contains no discussion of the conflict of interest claim or the original claim of payment of a bribe, it appears that Respondents did not attempt to pursue either of these allegations in the Second Circuit.  

Despite these facts, as of July 4, 2025, the ChatGPT summary that answered a query about “Marc Goldstein reputation as an arbitrator,” stated that in 2024 “allegations surfaced accusing Goldstein of not disclosing a familial connection to a Goldman Sachs-affiliated individual,” stated that “[a]s of the most recent public filings, the Southern District of New York has not vacated the award but the matter remains under judicial scrutiny,” and further stated that there existed a “concern” about a “single high-profile conflict-of-interest allegation” that is “unresolved and under review.”  This was and is incorrect, in multiple respects. The ChatGPT summary as of July 4, 2025 – possibly now modified as the result of the publication of this Personal Note -- mistakenly relied on disinformation in the Arbitration Monitor articles referenced above. What occurred in 2024 was that the Arbitration Monitor website – which the Fifth Partial Final Award determined to be not only aligned with Respondents but created by them or on their behalf as a vehicle to publicize their allegations -- repeated the 2022 and 2023 allegations of conflict-of-interest without reporting on the ICDR’s rejection of the allegations in 2022 and the Court’s rejection of the allegations in 2023. As a result, the above-referenced ChatGPT assessment of my reputation, made in evident reliance on an Arbitration Monitor article in 2024 and the presumed continuing currency of the information therein, did not take into account the facts about the ICDR’s rejection of the allegation of conflict-of-interest in 2022, the Southern District of New York’s rejection of that allegation in January 2023, and the Second Circuit’s affirmance of the Southern District’s Judgment in February 2024.  The ChatGPT summary as of July 4, 2025, also failed to report that the Respondents’ separate lawsuit to disqualify the Tribunal was dismissed by Judge Kaplan on February 20, 2024 in a Memorandum Endorsement linked HERE.