Originally Posted by
All Nighter
Global,
No offense taken. The BK transcripts are available but I'll have to do some digging in my archives and perhaps contact a couple of the TWA pilots directly involved in the whole affair at the time to get a reference to them. They're a matter of public record and they're out there somewhere.
It's America...you're entitled to disagree. However, if you think every large company out there isn't able to legally hide money by taking advantage of the loopholes in GAAP and the tax code you're severely deluded. There are myriad ways for even a half-wit accountant to legally take cash off the books, and the SEC has no interest in such legal shenanigans...only the illegal kind.
Yes, if you could find the transcripts to the court case, the actual testimony, that would be great. I have a paralegal buddy but he only sent me the stuff I had mostly already on that TWA court website. I'm not looking to nitpick your points about the sequence of events. I just want to read the case and the testimony.
Color me deluded. The shareholders own the corporation. The Board is supposed to be a steward of the corporation. If any member of the board and/or management took cash, property, whatever, "out of the company" illegally, then they are stealing from the shareholders. Period. Agree to disagree.
Now I did find TWA's 10K filings. I did see, for example, where TWA prepaid some obligations, but the prepayments were accounted for as a company asset. It is very easy to see and was a line item on their 10K. Also, TWA was losing significant amounts of money for the 3 years leading up to their last filed 10K, at a time when other airlines were very profitable. Management might have been moving money from one column to another, but there is no way in my opinion they were cooking the books to the tune of those losses. Again, agree to disagree.
To answer your comment about why AA would want to get TWA in a prepackaged deal vs. waiting for bankruptcy and picking up the pieces, I would assume they would not want to risk loss of control of the deal, hence the pre-packaged agreement. And I read that ticket deal was costing TWA an estimated 100M - 150M annually. Now there is some stealing right there!
I am not disputing that ALPA did something wrong. They were found guilty by a jury- there's not much more to say about that. When will financial damages be determined?
Anyway, thanks for getting the transcripts if you can.