Houston's NCI Building Systems Wins $2.2 Million Fraud Judgment Against Green Span Executive Kelly R. Ginn

HOUSTON, April 3, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Houston-based NCI Building Systems, Inc. (NYSE: NCS) has won a $2.2 million civil court judgment against Kelly R. Ginn, NCI's former executive vice president and current executive at Green Span Profiles. A Houston jury found that Mr. Ginn committed fraud, breached his fiduciary duty, and was unjustly enriched.

The judgment was signed in February by Judge Mike D. Miller of the 11th Civil District Court in Houston following an October 2011 jury verdict in the same court. The total judgment amount is based on the return of all benefits that Mr. Ginn received, plus interest, from NCI under a retirement agreement that jurors found was procured by fraud.

NCI, one of the world's leading manufacturers of metal construction components, filed the lawsuit after Mr. Ginn started a competing business in violation of his retirement agreement. After suit was filed, NCI discovered that Mr. Ginn also took massive amounts of internal company documents without permission and with no intention of using them for the company's benefit. Mr. Ginn is the son of NCI's former Chairman and CEO and worked at the company for 23 years. Mr. Ginn is now president and CEO of Green Span, a joint venture with McElroy Metals.

"We are happy to see NCI vindicated. The jury came back in only five hours after hearing three weeks of complicated testimony," says attorney Rusty Hardin of Houston's Rusty Hardin & Associates LLP, lead counsel for NCI. "The evidence showed what happened here, and the jury made the right decision."

During trial, jurors heard evidence that Mr. Ginn copied more than 370,000 company documents, some of which were alleged to have been used in Mr. Ginn's new competing start-up business, Green Span Profiles. Those documents, if stacked, would have reached a height of 123 feet, or 81 percent of the height of the Statue of Liberty, jurors learned.

Mr. Ginn initially denied copying the documents during pretrial discovery, but later admitted during trial what he had done. Jurors rejected Mr. Ginn's assertion that he copied the documents only to try to help serve as a consultant for NCI after he left the company. His resignation came shortly after Mr. Ginn learned that he would not be named the company's chief operating officer.

The case is NCI Building Systems, Inc. v. Kelly R. Ginn, et al., No. 2009-35831.

About NCI Building Systems, Inc.
NCI Building Systems, Inc. is one of North America's largest integrated manufacturers of metal products for the nonresidential building industry. NCI is comprised of a family of companies operating manufacturing facilities across the United States and Mexico, with additional sales and distribution offices throughout the United States and Canada. You can learn more about NCI at www.ncigroup.com.

For more information on NCI's courtroom win, please contact Mary Flood at 800-559-4534 or [email protected].

SOURCE NCI Building Systems, Inc.