Originally Posted by
globalexpress
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.
Working on it. Most of the people who have what you request are involved in the lawsuit and don't have time at the moment to go digging in their archives. Will pass it along if/when I get it.
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.
Yes, the shareholders "own" the corporation but the BOD "runs" it. I didn't say anyone "took cash, property, whatever, out of the company illegally". What I said was "any half-wit accountant can HIDE money and assets LEGALLY through loop holes in GAAP and SEC reporting rules. Case in point, AMR requested and was granted an SEC reporting waiver for a serious amount of cash last year. Basically, they don't want anyone to know what they're up to and asked the SEC to allow them to keep it off of the records until 2019. The SEC granted the waiver....so much for your trust in the official paper trail as a "tell-all".
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.
I'm working on getting permission from the author...the man who was the TWA Pilots representative on the TWA BOD...to post a letter he recently wrote. In his letter he verifies basically what I said in the beginning - that TWA wasn't broke. Assuming he gives me permission I'll post it here for you to read.
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!
"Loss of control" of WHAT deal? Oh, you mean the one that would double their size and route structure and give them the newest fleet in the industry at that time while eliminating a competitor who wouldn't die and, in fact, was making a comeback and putting a huge dent in their operation? Yes, the Karabu agreement was a bit of a drag on TWA's finances. But there were only 18 monts left before the deal expired and TWA was staying current in spite of the drag. What that means is that in less than 2 years TWA would become 100M to 150M profitable overnight and become a very serious competitor to American. Management at AMR simply would not suffer that kind of competition and moved to eliminate it before things got seriously out of hand. The ONLY sure way they had of making sure TWA didn't go to someone else and remain a dangerous competitor was to make double damn sure THEY were the ones who got it. Hence, their reason for upping their ante in BK court against Jay Alix/Boeing.
As to the "stealing"....My head will probably end up on a pike for saying this publically but, Carl Icahn for all that he was or wasn't, to my knowledge never did anything illegal . He's a master of the game, and I don't like him or what he does any more than anyone else. But the blame for the Karabu agreement lies squarely with TWA management for making a deal with the devil in the first place. Karabu was the price of getting him to walk away. And, in my humble opinion, was the best money TWA ever spent.
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?
It's a "bifurcated" trial. First a trial to determine guilt....done. Next a trial to determine damages. Six months to a year would be a fair guess.