© 2014 The Texas Lawbook. By Jeff Bounds Staff Writer for The Texas Lawbook (April 24) – A Dallas private equity fund is taking officials of a Louisiana company to task over allegations that they secretly set up a “shell” company to funnel money out of the business when the fund owned a piece of that company, court records show. The North Texas Opportunity Fund LP alleges in a petition filed April 9 in state district court in Dallas that officials of Hammerman & Gainer International Inc. surreptitiously set up the shell business partly so they could enrich themselves. Hammerman & Gainer previously was based in Irving, and shifted its headquarters to New Orleans in late 2008, court documents say. Additionally, the petition alleges, Hammerman & Gainer officials wanted to reduce the value of their company in anticipation of buying back the private equity fund’s 3 million preferred shares, for which it paid a total of $3 million between 2004 and 2005. “The fund was alerted by government authorities that Hammerman & Gainer and its related entities and principals were being investigated and hid revenue and profits from the fund. We believe they did hide revenue and profits, and we intend to aggressively pursue all of our claims,” said Arthur Hollingsworth, a partner at the fund, which has in excess of $25 million in capital under management. The fund previously sued the defendants over this same set of issues in 2012. North Texas Opportunity and the defendants agreed to postpone that litigation because of an on-going criminal investigation by the Internal Revenue Service, court documents show. North Texas Opportunity officials said in their petition this week that they received a grand jury subpoena from the