One of two sisters who sued their uncle, the billionaire cheese mogul James Leprino, in 2020 has sold her shares in their family’s Leprino Foods, but the other one is suing again.
Filed on the final day of March, Nancy Leprino’s lawsuit recommences a family feud that dates back a dozen years and reopens a window into the deeply private family company. Some of her claims were the focus of a 2022 trial at which a jury sided with her late uncle over her.
“That verdict has apparently emboldened (Leprino Foods and Nancy’s cousins) to push the minority shareholders out of the company,” she claims in her latest lawsuit. “They saw the decision as giving them carte blanche to bring their campaign of oppression to its conclusion.”
The Denver company, which rarely answers media requests, did not answer BusinessDen’s.
The Italian immigrant Mike Leprino Sr. began what would become Leprino Foods as a small grocery store at 1830 W. 38th Ave. in Sunnyside. After the store closed, his son James Leprino turned it into a cheese company and his other son, Mike, became a minority owner.
Capitalizing on America’s delivery pizza craze, Leprino Foods became the world’s largest manufacturer of mozzarella and today is the sole vendor of that cheese for Pizza Hut, Domino’s and Papa John’s. It was last valued in 2021 at $5 billion, or more than $5,000 per share.
Mike Leprino Jr. died in 2018 and James Leprino died last year, so the company passed down a generation to Mike’s three daughters (including Nancy) and James’ two daughters. Because James was the majority owner, his daughters, Terry Leprino and Gina Vecchiarelli, control it.
“Between May 2024 and the present, the majority shareholders bought out the other minority shareholders — Nancy’s sisters, Laurie and Mary — at predatory prices,” she alleges.
Dollar figures are redacted throughout Nancy Leprino’s lawsuit but she claims that Laurie’s 8.3% of the company and Mary’s 8.3% of the company should have been worth $400 million each, yet “the purchase price represented over a 75% discount,” suggesting they were bought out for about $100 million each in the spring and summer of 2024, according to Nancy.
“While this seems like a large amount of money,” her lawsuit acknowledges, “the fair value of shares representing over 8% ownership in a $5 billion company was far greater.
“Nancy has so far refused to accept a similar lowball offer from the company,” the suit says.
Instead, she has been trying to sell her shares to an unidentified third party “affiliated with a large private equity firm,” but her cousins have used a provision in the company’s founding documents to block the sale. Nancy Leprino’s lawsuit calls this sabotage. “The defendants’ message to Nancy is clear: sell to us at depressed prices or you will not sell at all.”
She is suing Leprino Foods, Terry Leprino, Gina Vecchiarelli, Gina’s husband, Dan Vecchiarelli, and their 26 trust funds for breach of fiduciary duty and illegal or oppressive conduct.
She wants Denver District Judge Ian Kellogg to force the defendants to either pay dividends — Leprino Foods has not done so in a decade — or buy her out at an undisclosed “fair price.” If it does neither, she wants a receiver appointed or the company dissolved.
Her lawyers in the new case are Jason Murray, Kenzo Kawanabe, Sean Grimsley and Noah Nix at Olson Grimsley Kawanabe Hinchcliff & Murray in Denver, who declined to comment.
Read more from our partner, .
