Canopy is at heart of feud

When Novell founder Ray Noorda began The Canopy Group in 1992, he hoped the venture capital firm would help software start-ups in Utah and generate a steady source of funding for the charities to which he gave money.

Noorda, now 80 and said to be suffering from Alzheimer's disease, never imagined Canopy would one day pit his daughter against his hand-picked successor in a bitter feud over control of the $300 million company.

In dueling lawsuits recently filed in 4th District Court in Provo, each side accuses the other of taking advantage of the ailing high-tech wizard to seize control of his millions.

Ralph Yarro, former president and chief executive officer of Lindon-based company, says he and two other top-level executives were illegally fired on Dec. 17 by a group led by Noorda's daughter, Val Noorda Kriedel of Orange County, Calif.

In a countersuit, Kriedel and the new power structure at The Canopy Group charge that Yarro, former chief financial officer Darcy Mott and ex-corporate counsel Brent Christensen took at least $25 million from the company through "a series of self-dealing and wasteful transactions" over the past six years.

The countersuit also alleges that while the three were handsomely paid and compensated through incentives and stock options, Ray Noorda was only paid $60,000 a year and his wife Lewena, who also sat on the company's board of directors, wasn't paid at all.

"What Kriedel and others are saying is that from 1998-2004 Ray (Noorda) was under the influence of a Machiavellian svengali who used his relationship with Ray to take advantage of him and basically steal his money," says Kimball Thompson, a public-relations agent hired by Yarro. "The truth is, Ralph was (Noorda's) hand-picked successor who he loved and trusted. He always wanted him to be an equal partner."

Yarro met Noorda in the early 1990s when he was an employee at Novell. In 1996, two years after Noorda retired as Novell president and CEO, Yarro was tapped to run Canopy.

Canopy's mission was to serve as an "incubator" for high-tech start-up companies, and over the years the firm would invest in dozens of companies, most notably the SCO Group, which made headlines for suing IBM and Linux users for copyright infringement.

Beginning in 2002, Noorda's involvement in Canopy diminished due to his age and declining health, Yarro said in an affidavit, and in March 2004 Yarro began to worry about Noorda's mental capacity. His mentor would sometimes show up to meetings and church functions disheveled and disoriented. He began forgetting to shave and couldn't recall the names of longtime associates.