FEBRUARY 26, 2013 — Plaintiffs in a suit against Carnival Corporation brought following the January 2012 Costa Concordia grounding incident have won what law firm Napoli Bern Ripka Shkolnik, LLP calls “a huge victory.”
A District Judge in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida last week ordered the claims of 104 survivors of the incident remanded to the Florida State Court for continued litigation. The court’s February 15, 2013 order concerned two cases, Denise Abeid-Saba , et al., v. Carnival Corporation et al., (USDC-SDFla Docket No.: 12-CV-23513) and Scimone v. Carnival Corp., (USDC-S.D.Fla Docket No.: 12-CV-23505), together representing the claims of 104 plaintiffs injured when the cruise ship capsized after grounding on rocks just off the shore of Isola del Giglio .
Both cases were initially commenced in the Florida State Court against Carnival Corp. as the parent corporation as well as the ship designers and the architect.
The cases were removed to the Federal Court by the defendants under the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 (“CAFA”), which allows for the removal of so-called “mass actions” to the federal courts. As the District Court noted, however, the CAFA expressly excludes those cases that are consolidated by a defense motion to achieve the CAFA minimum of 100 plaintiffs. Since neither the Abeid-Saba action nor the Scimone action contained 100 plaintiffs, the Court held that neither was amenable to removal under CAFA. Defendants also plead “federal question” jurisdiction as a second basis for removal; the District Court rejected this argument as well, holding that the interests in the litigation of the Italian government, which took no position in the litigation and neither owned nor operated the doomed vessel, were “speculative at best.”
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