Florida Governor Ron DeSantis vowed that he will be taking action against Disney after attorneys for his newly appointed board that oversees the governance of Walt Disney World discovered this week that the old board quietly signed an agreement that transferred its power to Disney.
The old board signed the agreement to transfer its power to the company on February 8, and the agreement was recorded with the Orange County Comptroller on February 9 — the same day that the Florida House passed legislation that renamed the Reedy Creek Improvement District to the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District and removed Disney’s self-appointed board and replaced it with a board appointed by the governor.
“There’s a lot of little back-and-forth going on now with the state control,” DeSantis said during a book stop tour in Smyrna, Georgia, late this week. “But rest assured — you ain’t seen nothing yet. There’s more to come in that regard.”
News 6 WKMG reported that the discovery was made by attorneys who were hired by the new board. The special counsel also discovered that the old board used a common law property rule known as the “rule against perpetuities” to extend how long Disney has control of the powers.
The rule “states that no interest in land is good unless it must vest, if at all, not later than twenty-one years after some life in being at the creation of the interest,” according to Cornell Law School.
Disney then invoked a “Royal lives clause,” which tried to extend the length of the contract for as long as possible by tying it to the lineage of the Royal family.
The document signed by the old board and Disney said, “[T]his Declaration shall continue in effect until twenty one (21) years after the death of the last survivor of the descendants of King Charles III, King of England living as of the date of this Declaration.”
“I cannot tell you the level of my disappointment in Disney. I thought so much better of them,” said board member Ron Peri. “This essentially makes Disney the government. This board loses, for practical purposes, the majority of its ability to do anything beyond maintain the roads and maintain basic infrastructure.”
“I mean, I don’t know what else to say,” Peri added. “I think these documents are void ab initio, I think they were an extremely aggressive overreach, and I’m very disappointed that they’re here.”
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