Poor Steve Schwarzman.
The billionaire buyout king, made infamous for his million-dollar birthday party two years ago and a penchant for $40 crab legs, is getting caught up in a recently filed lawsuit which accuses his Blackstone Group of pinching pennies on its Financial Times Web subscriptions.
In a suit filed Wednesday in state Supreme Court, the highbrow, pink-papered financial rag charged Blackstone with sharing a single subscription to the FT’s Web site among its employees.
According to the lawsuit, in order to avoid paying for multiple subscriptions, each of which can cost up to $300 a year, a so-called “senior employee” at Blackstone set up an account that was then shared with other staffers.
The senior employee used a Blackstone credit card to set up the account and chose “theblackstonegroup” as the user name and “blackstone” as password, the lawsuit claims.
Blackstone officials didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The London-based FT picked up on the alleged cheating last year when it noticed that the Blackstone employee with the account had accessed thousands of articles between 2006 and 2008, “far more than an individual would normally access,” the lawsuit said.
A closer look revealed “widespread use of the single, individual account” by Blackstone employees located both in the US and abroad. The suit also alleged the abuse goes back as far as 2002.
Blackstone’s penny-pinching ways stand in stark contrast to the way Schwarzman lives. Two years ago, his wife threw a $3 million 60th-birthday party for the buyout king that featured 500 guests, and included a performance by Rod Stewart. A Wall Street Journal story chronicled Schwarzman’s fondness for $40 crab legs and for running up weekend food bills of $3,000.
The Financial Times is suing both Blackstone and 100 unnamed individuals, which it refers to as John Does 1 through 100, for copyright infringement and violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
The Financial Times said it is currently uncertain of the identities of John Does 1 through 100, but said it will name them personally if granted a discovery process that will allow them to be identified.
The paper also takes a swing at Blackstone as a whole, saying the firm “had a direct financial interest in, and the right and ability to control” the conduct of the 100 employees. As a result, the employees acted as “agents” of Blackstone in sharing the Web site subscription.
Blackstone shares closed yesterday at $4.51, up a penny from its previous close. The stock is trading well below its public offering price of $31 a share when the private-equity giant went public in June 2007, right before the credit crunch hit.
Shares of Pearson PLC, which owns the Financial Times, closed at $9.51 a share yesterday, up 0.5 percent from the previous day. kaja.whitehouse@nypost.com