DEFENDANT ASKED PLAINTIFF TO WIRE THE LOAN PROCEEDS TO A BANK IN NEW YORK; NEW YORK THEREFORE HAD JURISDICTION, PURSUANT TO CPLR 302, OVER THIS BREACH OF CONTRACT ACTION STEMMING FROM DEFENDANT’S ALLEGED FAILURE TO REPAY THE LOAN (SECOND DEPT).
The Second Department, reversing Supreme Court, determined that defendant’s motion to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction should not have been granted. Plaintiff demonstrated defendant had a bank account in a New York bank to which the funds defendant borrowed from plaintiff were wired. Plaintiff alleged defendant breached a contract requiring the repayment of the loan:
CPLR 302(a)(1) provides that “a court may exercise personal jurisdiction over any non-domiciliary . . . who in person or through an agent . . . transacts any business within the state.” “The CPLR 302(a)(1) jurisdictional inquiry is twofold: under the first prong the defendant must have conducted sufficient activities to have transacted business in the state, and under the second prong, the claims must arise from the transactions” … . The sufficient activities requirement is satisfied “so long as the defendant’s activities here were purposeful” … . “Purposeful activities are those with which a defendant, through volitional acts, avails [himself or herself] of the privilege of conducting activities within the forum State, thus invoking the benefits and protections of its laws” … .
“To satisfy the second prong of CPLR 302(a)(1) that the cause of action arise from the contacts with New York, there must be an articulable nexus . . . or substantial relationship . . . between the business transaction and the claim asserted” … . “This inquiry is relatively permissive, and does not require causation, but merely a relatedness between the transaction and the legal claim such that the latter is not completely unmoored from the former, regardless of the ultimate merits of the claim” … . “CPLR 302(a)(1) is a single act statute and proof of one transaction in New York is sufficient to invoke jurisdiction, even though the defendant never enters New York, so long as the defendant’s activities here were purposeful and there is a substantial relationship between the transaction and the claim asserted” … . Skutnik v Messina, 2019 NY Slip Op 08725, Second Dept 12-4-19