Peter Schorsch
After moving to Florida to buy a restaurant, a Canadian couple is now accusing the owner of fraud, saying she misled them on the eatery’s profits.
In 2017, Marcus and Irina Graeber of Winnipeg, Manitoba, saw an online advertisement offering Café Vienna in St. Petersburg for sale. German native Beate Klobucar and her husband Tony “Coach” Klobucar, opened the German-style restaurant on Snell Isle in 1999, moving it to its current Fourth Street N location in 2006.
In a suit filed April 11 in Pinellas County Circuit Court, the Graeber’s claim an agent — named only as “John/Jane Doe” — told them that Klobucar wanted to get out of the business following Tony’s death in 2016 at age 73.
According to court papers, the agent said that after Tony Klobucar died, the restaurant’s longtime staff largely ran it themselves “without supervision,” netting an annual profit of roughly $100,000.
To help make the sale, Klobucar’s broker — listed as Emiliya Clark of Sarasota — offered two documents: Cafe Vienna’s tax returns, and profit-and-loss statements.
The suit alleges the broker explained that the tax returns understated Café Vienna’s profitability because, as a “cash” business, they did not report all income to the IRS. Also, another buyer was interested in the business, the agent said; the Graeber’s needed to act “within a day or two.”
After agreeing on a $97,000 purchase price, the Graeber’s began selling property in Canada to move themselves and their family to Florida to take over the restaurant. The couple even discussed the pending purchase in December during an interview on a German-language Internet radio show.
Now, the couple says they were defrauded, claiming Klobucar and/or the broker deliberately overstated Café Vienna’s average annual profits. After the sale closed, Klobucar admitted she had been underreporting income on tax returns, and not all the revenue shown on the books was net profit because some cash went to pay long-term employees “under the table.”
Making matters worse, the Graeber’s discovered that at least one Café Vienna employee was in the country illegally and that their pay “further diluted the real ‘profit.’”
To sell the business, those actions constituted “unfair and deceptive trade practices,” the suit says.
The Graeber’s seek damages for breach of contract, fraud, civil theft and misleading advertising.
