(PRWEB) February 20, 2015
Richard Nickelson, the former CFO of Creative Learning Corporation has filed a lawsuit against the company for alleged defamation in the Circuit Court, Seventh Judicial Circuit, St. John’s County Florida, case number 2015-CA-0174, related to the circumstances of his departure from the company in October of last year.
Creative Learning Corporation, the parent company of the popular franchise concept brand known as Bricks 4 Kidz© is headquartered in St. Augustine, Florida. According to the court document, Creative Learning hired Mr. Nickelson as controller, their very first finance professional, in February of 2012 and had recently been promoted to the newly created CFO position in early September of 2014.
The filed lawsuit alleges that within a matter of weeks after accepting the CFO position, which elevated Mr. Nickelson to an SEC defined level of an executive officer of the company, Mr. Nickelson quickly discovered he found himself in harm’s way associated with this new level of liability as a member of the company’s executive management team.
The lawsuit alleges that Mr. Nickelson’s new position as CFO was immediately compromised as Mr. Nickelson witnessed the CEO and Chairman of the Board making specific misrepresentations about the company’s core issues to investors at a Detroit investor conference, as well as believing that the company could be subject to employee actions against the management for an improperly conducted human resource investigation.
According to the court document, Mr. Nickelson proposed a mutually beneficial exit and severance agreement in response to his need to leave the company, and alleges that in the ensuing tactics pursued by the Board of Directors the process turned into retaliation against Mr. Nickelson. Creative Learning filed an SEC 8-K reporting the change which the lawsuit alleges erroneously stated that the company had terminated Mr. Nickelson.
The filed lawsuit alleges that this hostile and threatening process that the company used against Mr. Nickelson was not a termination and that the filing of this public document as such has caused damage to Mr. Nickelson’s career and professional reputation. In the lawsuit, Mr. Nickelson seeks to have the SEC 8-K amended to properly address the facts of his departure and claims damages for defamation.
“These last four months have been the hardest time of my business career,” stated Mr. Nickelson. “I understood that both the company and I had needs in working out a smooth exit for myself from the company, even though we did not have an employment contract in place. I did my best to try to make this a peaceful and mutually beneficial resignation and exit process from the company. The facts of the case will have to speak for themselves in how I was treated in this process, and now the court will have to decide.”
A copy of the lawsuit can be found on the St. John’s County legal website, at http://www.clk.co.st-johns.fl.us/Misc/onlinesearch.html, case #2015-CA-0174.
Mr. Nickelson can be reached for further comment at http://RichardNickelson.com.
