A Texas oil heiress hired a new chief investment officer in January 2025 and fired him less than three months later. By August 2025, she was suing him. In September 2026, the case settled.
The family office is Thompson Petroleum Corporation (TPC), an upstream oil and gas company that also manages the wealth of heiress Jean Christine Thompson. The CIO was Michael Mann, founder of Dallas investment firm Anchor Capital. Before hiring him, Thompson had already invested more than $40 million in Anchor’s funds.
Thompson’s lawsuit alleged that, within weeks of starting, Mann committed a family holding company to five investments without the prior written approval required by his contract. It also alleged that he overstated his assets to secure a $15 million loan from Thompson in 2024, which helped him buy out a partner at Anchor and was backed by his personal guaranty. According to the complaint, Mann “wheedled his way into Thompson’s good graces” before betraying her trust.
Mann denied the allegations and argued that Thompson had approved the investments verbally. His lawyers called the claims “baseless, false, and conjured to obtain leverage,” and pointed to Thompson’s history of litigation with former employees and counterparties.
In May 2026, the Texas Business Court ruled on Thompson’s request for summary judgment, granting it in part and denying it in part. The court found that TPC had not conclusively established that the alleged unauthorized investments caused financial injury, describing its damages theory as “wishful thinking.” It also found that the adequacy of Mann’s personal financial statement remained a disputed question of fact. However, the court concluded that TPC had established grounds to fire Mann for cause because he had not shown that Thompson waived the written-approval requirement under the contract. This ruling also supported TPC’s position that Mann was not entitled to further incentive compensation.
The parties signed a confidential settlement on September 23, 2026. The terms are private, but a court filing shows the defendants will make three payments to Thompson: one in October 2026, another in April 2027 and a third in October 2027. A separate arbitration over her Anchor fund investments is still ongoing.
Because the case settled, the underlying allegations will not be resolved through a trial in this lawsuit. But the dispute illustrates how much can ride on one person when authority, relationships and oversight aren’t clearly defined. Whether the investments were properly approved became a dispute over what had been said, while a $15 million loan raised questions about the financial information used to support it.
Family offices run on trust, and that’s both their strength and their weak spot. Many are lean teams where a principal hires someone they know, gives them broad authority and checks in informally. That can work well until roles, relationships and approvals start to blur.
Three patterns emerge from the Thompson case, and none is unique to it:
The industry is increasingly aware of operational risk, but some safeguards are slipping. In the 2026 RBC and Campden Wealth North America Family Office Report, 59% of surveyed family offices identified cybersecurity and data breaches as a top near-term operational concern, up from 16% the previous year. Meanwhile, reported use of dual payment authorization fell from 84% to 73%, and two-factor authentication fell from 92% to 83%.
These findings relate to cybersecurity and payment controls rather than investment approvals specifically, but they point to a broader challenge: maintaining effective safeguards as family offices manage increasingly complex operations.
The Thompson case doesn’t prove that any single control would have prevented the dispute. But several practical measures can help family offices establish clearer accountability and reduce the room for disagreement about who decided what.
Documented approvals. Capital commitments should require recorded approval before they can proceed. The approval should identify who authorized the investment and when, leaving a clear record rather than relying on recollections of verbal conversations.
An audit trail for every decision. Record who proposed an investment, who approved it, when the decision was made and what information supported it. In the Thompson case, part of the disagreement concerned what had been said and when. A reliable record makes decisions easier to review later.
Independent verification. Before lending to someone or hiring someone whose financial position is material to a transaction, have a third party review the relevant financial statements and supporting records. This is a preventive measure, not an accusation. In the Thompson case, the court did not find that Mann’s financial statement was inaccurate; it found that the adequacy of the statement remained a question of fact.
Separate the roles. An investment manager you’ve backed, a borrower you’ve lent to and a CIO who decides where your money goes can end up being the same person. When those relationships overlap, additional oversight and clear conflict-of-interest procedures become especially important.
One consolidated view of the portfolio. A family office should be able to see its commitments, entities and cash movements in one place. That includes activity through holding companies: the five investments at the centre of the Thompson dispute were made through a family entity, not directly in Thompson’s own name. New commitments should be visible as they occur, rather than pieced together months later.
If you’re hiring a CIO or already have one, review the following:
Most family offices will never face a lawsuit like Thompson’s. But many rely on a small number of trusted people with broad authority across complex portfolios and multiple entities. The answer isn’t to trust people less. It’s to pair clear approval policies and independent oversight with good visibility, so trust doesn’t have to carry all the weight.
Software doesn’t replace governance, but it can support it. MYFO gives principals and their teams a consolidated view of assets, entities, commitments and supporting documents. It maps ownership across holding structures and maintains an audit trail of activity, with role-based permissions to help manage access.
MYFO also pulls banking data directly into the platform, giving principals and their teams visibility into cash movements as banking data updates. If a large amount of cash leaves an account to fund an investment that hasn't received the required approval, the transaction is visible in MYFO rather than surfacing weeks later in a report. Combined with a consolidated view of assets, entities, commitments and supporting documents, this helps family offices identify unexpected activity and follow up before small gaps in oversight become larger problems.
Alongside the approval policies and oversight a family office establishes, that visibility makes it easier to understand what has been committed, through which entity and what records support the decision.
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