Favelle Favco and the former president of its US operations, Danny Davis, have reached an agreement to put an end to their long-running legal dispute.
The dispute began when Favco removed Davis from his post on 8 September 1999.
It centred on property rights: the patent to a range of crawler cranes based on Caterpillar excavator lower works was registered in the name of Davis, but Favco owned 90% of the company set up to produce and market the machines in the USA.
On 8 March this year a US district court ruled that Favco USA was the rightful owner of the patent, not Davis, and threw out Davis’ claim that Favco was infringing ‘his’ patent by continuing to build the cranes. Davis subsequently lost an appeal against this hearing.
The settlement was reached just ahead of a further federal court trial, due to be heard in Brownsville, Texas, of a new suit brought by Davis against Favco. According to Davis, various well known industry names had been lined up to testify as witnesses, for one side or the other, including former Manitex general manager Joe Conway, former Simon and Link-Belt engineer Jim Rusk and lifting industry consultant Stuart Anderson.
A joint statement dated Sunday 12 August (the day before the trial was scheduled to begin), said: ‘Daniel E. Davis and Favelle Favco Group have reached an agreement concerning certain intellectual property rights previously in dispute between them. Under the terms of the agreement, Daniel E. Davis is the owner of the United States Patent No. 6,003,252, related to crawler cranes, and Favelle Favco USA, Inc. has a retroactive, royalty-free right and license to make, have sold, use, sell and offer to sell under the patent for the term of the patent. There is a limitation on the assignability of the royalty-free licence.’ Davis would not add to the statement except to say that he planned to start making the crawler cranes himself, in competition with Favelle Favco, ‘but not just yet’. He added: ‘I’m going to take it easy for a while. I am glad it’s over. There’s closure and everybody can move on.’ He would not reveal the size of the payment that he had received from Favelle Favco, but has previously claimed to have lost close to $700,000 pursuing the case.
Favco USA director Rob Ferree described the settlement as ‘a full stop’, and added: ‘He can’t make any more appeals on this.’ Ferree said that Favco now had ‘about 22 or 25’ crawler cranes out in the field in the USA – most of them are sold, some are on lease purchase agreements. All but six have been sold in the last 12 months, he said.
All Erection, one of the biggest crane rental companies in the USA, bought five units in June, taking three units of the 30T model (30 US ton capacity telescopic boom crawler crane) and two 40T units (40 ton telescopic crawler crane).
There are a further four units in Europe, owned by Dutch equipment rental companies.
