Felix Investments's Frank Mazzola LinkedIn Back in March 2010, the private stock fund managers over at Felix Investments thought they had acquired 75,000 shares of Facebook stock from an engineer named Karl Voskuil.

Turns out the deal never went through. Now Felix Investments is suing the marketplace they used to find the shares, SecondMarket.

PEhub explains:

The suit alleges that Felix struck a deal in January 2010 to buy 75,000 shares of Facebook software engineer Karl Voskuil at a price of $33 per share, for a total of $2,475,000 after Facebook didn’t exercise its right of first refusal.

Felix has worked extensively with SecondMarket, the suit suggests, and believed the deal to be done, even informing its investors that Felix had obtained the shares last March. What the firm didn’t know at the time, it says in the suit, is that SecondMarket had failed to obtain a legal opinion for the Facebook shares within 60 days from when Voskuil notified Facebook of his intent to sale, instead missing the deadline by one day. Felix claims in its suit that it tried to “re-start” the 60-day window, but by April of last year, Facebook had instituted a new insider trading policy that kept Voskuil from selling the agreed-upon shares.

The suit claims Voskuil returned $2.4 million to Felix in March of this year, an amount representing the purchase price, minus a $75,000 fee paid to SecondMarket, which typically collects three percent of a transaction. The suit is seeking damages, including what it’s claiming is a lost profit of $9.5 million. (According to current Facebook $70 billion valuation on SecondMarket, Voskuil’s 75,000 shares would be worth $12 million today. When Voskuil, through SecondMarket, transacted with Felix in January 2010, Facebook’s valuation was an estimated $14 billion.)

SecondMarket says the claims are bunk.

Read the whole story at PEhub >>