No trace of lawyer handling MH370 case
Kuala Lumpur: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 mysteriously disappeared on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board.
Now, a lawyer who filed to sue Malaysia Airlines and Boeing has mysteriously disappeared as well.
According to a report in Forbes, Monica Ribbeck Kelly, a Chicago lawyer who made headlines by filing the lawsuit, has gone missing, and her clients are very unhappy.
The Forbes report said sibling lawyers Monica and Manuel Von Ribbeck ran Ribbeck Law Chartered.
The report quoted Edward Clinton Jr, who has filed a malpractice suit against Monica, as saying that sometime last year, Ribbeck Law shut down its phone and website. Monica herself returned to Lima, Peru.
According to the report, after the disappearance of MH370, Monica flew to Beijing and, along with William Wang, a Shanghai lawyer, convinced many family members to hire her to sue Boeing and Malaysia Airlines in the United States.
They were told there was big money in the lawsuits.
Monica then filed a discovery petition in the Cook County Superior Court on behalf of the MH370 families but a judge called it frivolous and threw out the case.
In a 2014 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Monica reportedly said that she had handled 40 airline crash cases.
This claim, the report said, probably helped her sign up dozens of families in Malaysia.
However, the Forbes report by contributor Christine Negroni said few attorneys had actually seen Monica do any legal work.
The report mentioned a case where one Guohua Chen, her husband and 10-year-old son were injured in the crash of Henan Airlines flight 8387 in northeast China in 2010.
William Wang allegedly made a presentation to the crash survivors on behalf of Monica, promising to sue Embraer, the Brazilian manufacturer of the airplane, and General Electric which produced the engines.
But Monica never filed any papers in the case according to the malpractice case brought by Clinton Jr.
By the time Chen discovered nothing had been done, it was too late to sue either entity.
Clinton Jr told Forbes Chen was devastated, and that she had been "duped".
MH370 disappeared on March 8, 2014, on a scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
Primary radar and automatic satellite tracking data indicated it doubled back over Malaysia 40 minutes into the flight before turning south on a long track to the southern Indian Ocean.
Meanwhile, The Australian reported that the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) said it could take another three months before it was able to release its report on its failed search for MH370.
The two-year search covering 120,000 sq km of ocean, funded by Australia, China and Malaysia but directed by the ATSB, ended in January without finding a trace of the aircraft.