Another gentleman who prefers to defer lunch payments
We’ve said it a few times here before: if you’re going to steal, steal big. What’s the point of stealing your own lunch?
Troy Ellis (Iowa BA ‘91, Missouri-KC JD ‘94) didn’t get the message. The former chief counsel of Invista walked out of the corporate lunch room eight times in a five-day period without paying. It was so brazen that the staff, who in my experience could care less if someone steals from the man, took the initiative to get security cameras installed.
It was just lunch, right? How bad could the repercussions be?
Public censure by the Supreme Court of Kansas for failing to “maintain his personal integrity” and by causing “actual injury” to the legal profession. That’s not even the interesting part. This guy chooses fascinating employers.
More on the perp, including the BigLaw connection and tangential relation to an actual (i.e., non-lunch-related) scandal, after the jump.
First, a little about Invista to put this story in context. You might not have heard of the company, but you’ve probably heard of some of its products: LYCRA® fiber, STAINMASTER® carpet, and COOLMAX® fabric.
More importantly, it’s a subsidiary of Koch Industries, which should be familiar because in addition to owning those Invista, and many other, brands, it is one of the largest privately held corporations in America. It slid from #1 in 2007 to #2 on the Forbes list. It’s a fascinating family conglomerate of the old school. Its ventures range from oil refinery to consumer products to municipal-engineering services. We could go on for hours about eccentric founder Fred C. Koch who, among other things, was a founding member of the John Birch Society. Son Bill famously spent over $150,000 on a bottle of wine that turned out to be fake and has since made a personal crusade of cleaning up the wine-auction process. Bill, by the way, spent years feuding with his other two brothers, one of whom (Charles, #9 on the Forbes list, tied with brother David) was the Libertarian party candidate in 1980, before selling out of the family business. That might have been a mistake – Bill is worth “only” $3 billion, good for #134 on the Forbes list. See what we mean about this family?
Ellis started at Polsinelli Shughart before moving on to spend almost four years at Alston & Bird, in the Corporate and Construction Law groups of each, according to his LinkedIn profile. He then joined Koch and moved on to Invista.
Then things get interesting (again). He left Invista in October 2007, presumably after lying to his boss and only admitted to purloining sandwiches after shown the videotape. In March 2008, he joined SemGroup as Business Development Leader, where he describes his role as
Advising new businesses on formation of corporations and business structures, drafting business plans and structuring commercial transactions.
SemGroup is (was) another massive private corporation that pumps and trucks oil. It ranked #18 on the 2008 Fortune list, based on 2007 revenues of $14.2 billion. The company filed for bankruptcy last July, four months after Ellis arrived – so presumably not his fault. It was reportedly the result of some wrong-way trades on oil futures, which you’ll recall wasn’t hard to do last summer as pundits were claiming oil would hit $200 per barrel shortly before it plummeted below $50. Interestingly, their bets were right but they couldn’t manage the liquidity problems.
Right now, SemGroup is in the middle of a fight between yet another billionaire industrialist, John Catsimatidis (#215 on the Forbes list), and former management.
Keep an eye on whichever company Ellis goes to work for next; there’s sure to be fireworks.
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Brilliant use of Wimpy. You rock.
Such brazen entitlement. I mean, how much could lunch have even cost him given the salary he was likely making? It's just ridiculous.
I suspect we're beyond the asshole/personality disorder for this behavior and into the Winona-Ryder-Shoplifting-Crazy milieu.