Don’t Mess With Miller

In case you didn’t already know – Harvey Miller’s bad side is not a good place to be. And some would say it’s all too easy to end up there (that’s why we’re always gushing about him).

In what was actually a nice piece about the bankruptcy legend, the Times called him “combative” and “outspoken.” Those who know him would admire the restraint.

The Wall Street Journal’s Bankruptcy Beat has gone back into its annals to recount a tale of how dogged the guy really running the Weil bankruptcy practice can be.

Remember, Miller is a man whose friends think he’s difficult. As the Times noted,

But even as lawyers express admiration for Mr. Miller, some also describe him as a hard man to get along with, a man whose temper has sometimes gotten the better of him. In one well-known instance, while representing Eastern Airlines in its reorganization effort nearly 20 years ago, he turned in frustration to a lawyer representing a potential buyer of the company and grabbed him by the collar — while both were in a judge’s chambers.

So imagine what happens when the “heavyweight champ of bankruptcy lawyers” (that sounds so much better than “Hero of the blog” as we call him) get personally offended by an opponent’s actions against his client.

That’s what happened a few years ago in the Inyx USA bankruptcy. Shortly after Miller’s return from Greenhill, he was engaged by Westernbank Puerto Rico, which lent money to Inyx, a pharmaceutical company. But Westernbank thought that Inyx’s president, Jack Kachkar, had pulled a fast one. Miller was pissed:

Miller railed against the alleged fraud perpetrated on Westernbank. He offered Inyx dirt-cheap bankruptcy financing on the sole condition Kachkar be banished. He ran search-and-seizure operations in Canada and Puerto Rico, dispatching bank auditors to grab computers, lock up offices and poke through shrink-wrapped piles of goods in search of hidden documents.

It was a far cry from the “let’s make a deal” climate then prevalent in Chapter 11. Inyx attorney Samuel Israel, whose specialty is courtroom brawling, Thursday recalled it as “knock-down drag-out litigation.” He is with the firm of Fox Rothschild.

Miller even engineered a mid-Chapter 11 corporate coup premised on the possession of a single share of stock. Then he ousted Kachkar and the rest of Inyx’s board of directors. “Inyx USA was a one-share company, and we have the one share,” Miller told Judge Kevin Gross during a courtroom debate.

All that was just the first month(!) of action after Inyx filed for “protection” from creditors, like Westernbank, for example.  It was all legal, accomplished under the shield of court orders or permissible because of the involvement of company units that were not under Chapter 11 protection, Miller said. No one ever proved anything different.

Poor Israel, by the way. This one is the bankruptcy litigator (Penn BS ‘83, Rutgers JD ‘89), not the hedge-fund moron who watched too many movies and tried a piss poor attempt at faking his suicide to avoid reporting for jail. He must get asked about that constantly.

Related posts:

1. The Interesting Tale of Harvey Miller and WLRK
2. Weil OWNS Bankruptcy
3. Weil Finally Getting Paid
4. WSJ Wanders Around 1 Bowling Green, Finds Lawyers
5. Bankruptcy League Table Out – Weil Not #1