Reuters Pic
The Obama administration’s favorite Chrysler agitator, White & Case’s Tom Lauria (pictured, red tie – that’s Glenn Kurtz in the blue tie beside him, FYI), keeps making news.
The lawyer for a number of Chrysler bondholders has been thick in the middle of a fight with the administration. Turns out, a number of clients didn’t like either the pressure from Washington (according to Lauria) or the noise from Lauria (according to Washington) and bowed out.
But he still has a few clients, and they’re paying well. After the jump we catch up on the whole shooting match.
To recap, Lauria claimed that the administration was strong-arming his clients (a bunch of hedge funds who were objecting to the administration’s plan for Chrysler). Lauria wanted to work out a better deal for his clients. But the administration wasn’t interested in talking.
Matt Feldman, a former Willkie lawyer now part of the triumvirate running point for Obama on the auto industry, wrote an email to one of the Chrysler advisors in which Feldman said he wouldn’t “bend over to a terrorist like Lauria.”
Still, Lauria will only be “the man who slowed the Chrysler deal” – not the man who stopped it. The temporary stay granted by Justice Ginsburg has been cleared and the deal is all set to close immediately.
Still, it was profitable work. One of the clients who stuck with White & Case is the Indiana state pension funds – to the tune of $2 million already, including the Supreme Court appeal. Other attorneys general who objected to the sale include those from Illinois and Ohio, although they objected because of the impact on their states’ workers’ compensation funds, not as bondholders like Indiana was.
Owen Pell handled the appeal, although the Indiana solicitor general would have argued before the Supreme Court, had it gotten that far.
Pell is taking the high road and leaving the hyperbole to partner Glenn Kurtz, who said of the fire sale to Chrysler, “others who believe the rule of law must be observed would call [approval of the sale] a flagrant, violent overthrow of that principle.”
Still, that $2 million bill is nothing compared to the $27 million tab Chrysler had run up with its counsel at Schulte over the past year on various engagements. Jones Day is Chrysler’s counsel in the bankruptcy, and their bill was $18.5 million just on the bankruptcy through the end of April.
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Oh it Kurtz me, it really Kurtz me.