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Monday, November 28, 2011
Courts - "Tribune Co. bankruptcy case haunting former shareholders: Creditors poised to go after even the smallest investors to claw back billions"
Did you ever own stock in the Tribune Company?
Michael Oneal and Ameet Sachdev, Chicago Tribune reporters, had a massive story in the Sunday Tribune on the consequences. Here is how it starts:
On Nov. 8, a two-page letter appeared on Tribune Co.'s bankruptcy court docket, wedged between the usual stream of motions and lawyer fee applications.It was written to the judge by an angry and bewildered Colorado investor named Mark Lies, who had owned stock in Tribune Co. when it was public and then cashed out like thousands of other shareholders when the media conglomerate went private in 2007.
Now, nearly four years later, Lies finds himself a defendant in one of dozens of lawsuits filed in courts around the country by a group of junior creditors hoping to claw back more than $2.5 billion of the $8.2 billion in proceeds from Tribune Co.'s disastrous leveraged buyout.
The lawsuits, 44 of them, target everyone who owned shares in the company when the deal closed, most of whom, it's safe to say, never considered the possibility that Tribune Co.'s descent into Chapter 11 less than a year after the buyout could come back to haunt them.
"What seems grossly unfair," Lies wrote to U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Kevin J. Carey, "is there doesn't seem to be any adult supervision looking out for the average investor like myself. … (Y)ou have unemotional, ruthlessly efficient and litigious investors attempting to extract whatever they can from whomever they can."
Lies and his fellow shareholders are caught in a legal battle that may be the most perplexing yet in a Tribune Co. bankruptcy case that has groaned on for nearly three years, producing a seemingly endless flood of expensive litigation.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on November 28, 2011 10:54 AM
Posted to Courts in general