Ninth Circuit Affirms Dismissal of Transnational Litigation Campaign Against Leading French Companies

Quinn Emanuel recently won an appellate victory in Aldini AG v. Silvaco Inc. for leading French companies MBDA France and Soitec and several of their executives.  On December 19, 2024, the Ninth Circuit affirmed a district court’s order dismissing Aldini AG’s claims against the Firm’s clients, and finally brought years of successful Quinn Emanuel advocacy on behalf of MBDA and Soitec to a close.  

            The story begins in 2018 with a distressed French microchip company called Dolphin Integration (“Dolphin”). By August 2018, after several bad quarters, Dolphin’s cash flow had deteriorated to the point that it was unlikely to be able to make payroll, so the company was put into a form of receivership. MBDA and Soitec bought Dolphin’s assets in the resulting bankruptcy proceeding. The French bankruptcy court, following the recommendation of virtually all major stakeholders, approved the sale.

             To almost everyone involved, this looked like an unremarkable (and indeed successful) bankruptcy proceeding. Aldini, a boutique Swiss investment bank that had owned a 2% stake in Dolphin, had other ideas. Aldini began filing lawsuits all over France, claiming that MBDA and Soitec had defrauded the bankruptcy court and built their offer to buy Dolphin on inside information from two alleged “Trojan Horse” directors on the Dolphin board. MBDA and Soitec were able to fend off the first wave of lawsuits in France, and secured several sanctions against Aldini for abuse of process.

 In June 2021, when most of the French cases were over or dormant, Aldini resurfaced in the Northern District of California with a Section 1782 application to take discovery from a Santa Clara company called Silvaco. About two years after buying Dolphin’s assets, MBDA and Soitec sold the non-defense assets to Silvaco France. Aldini sought to use this “new fact” to reboot its French claims, arguing that the sale to Silvaco consummated the conspiracy to defraud Aldini out of its 2% interest, and claiming that broad Section 1782 discovery from Silvaco would help prove the conspiracy. Aldini’s application was ex parte, meaning it could provide its own slanted version of events, and based on that version Magistrate Judge Cousins granted Aldini’s application and authorized it to serve a very broad document subpoena on Silvaco. 

            A small Quinn Emanuel team across offices successfully moved to intervene in the Section 1782 proceedings, quickly shutting down Aldini’s attempt to take U.S. discovery to advance its French lawsuits.  In August 2021, while the Section 1782 was pending, Aldini filed a 100-page, ten-claim complaint against MBDA, Soitec, and several current and former executives in the Northern District of California, seeking damages in excess of $700 million.  At that point the Quinn Emanuel team fully staffed up and brought the full weight of their cross-office and trans-national prowess to bear, filing a 40-page motion to dismiss (complete on numerous grounds and then, when Aldini amended its complaint, re-briefing the entire 40 pages on 24 hours’ notice.  In August 2022, the district court granted Quinn Emanuel’s motion to dismiss with prejudice.  It was as complete a victory as one can achieve as a defendant at the district court level: over a year of litigation, no discovery, and a dismissal without leave to amend.

            Aldini appealed to the Ninth Circuit.  After several rounds of briefing and an extended oral argument, in December 2024 the Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court’s dismissal of Aldini’s claims with prejudice in a six-page, unpublished, unanimous opinion.  Thus, over 4-plus years of U.S. litigation, a Quinn Emanuel team turned a $700 million lawsuit into zero recovery without any discovery taken or a single document produced, and without Aldini able to amend its claim to continue its litigation campaign against MBDA and Soitec.