Liz Elting founded one of America’s leading translation companies with her boyfriend from business school. But nearly 20 years after calling off their engagement, the ex-lovers are waging an ugly battle for control that’s landed them in corporate divorce court and may cost them what could be a billion-dollar baby.
For someone who has made a fortune trad-ing in words, Liz el ting can be remarkably tight-lipped. But the 50-yearold cofounder of TransPerfect, one of the world’s largest translation firms, is acting under lawyers’ orders. Her attorneys don’t want her saying much about the messy corporate divorce she’s been embroiled in with her coCeO and onetime fiancé, Phil Shawe. Nor do they want reporters at TransPerfect’s Park Avenue headquarters, where she shares a floor with Shawe, the day before she’s due to face him in a Delaware court over the future of their company.
That’s why, on a Tuesday morning in late April, elting is perched on a leather chair in her all-white living room on Manhattan’s upper east Side. A trim brunette in a navy-blue skirt suit, she has the energy of a slight, skittish bird. “TransPerfect is my brainchild, my baby,” she says. “I’d like to own this company and be part of its future.”
Elting and Shawe built the company from a dorm-room startup to a global leader with $505 million in sales. But tensions between them flared up five years ago, spilling into legal battles in two states with mortifying episodes of infighting. There was Shawe charging the petite elting with battery by high heel, his breaking into her office and stealing her confidential e-mails with attorneys, and f-bombs galore. Despite an astonishingly acrimonious relationship, the ex-lovers have thrived as business partners, and out of their dysfunction has grown a company that has, ironically, solved one of the world’s biggest problems— how to communicate better.
Denne historien er fra July 2016-utgaven av Forbes Indonesia.
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Denne historien er fra July 2016-utgaven av Forbes Indonesia.
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