Hughes Hubbard‘s James W. Giddens has finally picked a fight many people have been waiting to see for a year.
Giddens (pictured) is the Trustee for Liquidation of Lehman Brothers, and last week he filed a motion seeking to reclaim more than $8.2 billion for undervalued assets given to Barclay’s, when it took over the bank’s US operations last year.
Much of the alleged windfall was for employment contracts, which may have been negotiated by people who stood to benefit from making the deal go smoothly.
More on those people, and the two lawyers we found in the diaspora, after the jump.
WSJ’s Bankruptcy Beat did the legwork.
The key negotiators on Lehman’s side of the deal, according to a person familiar with the transaction, were Herbert “Bart” McDade, Alex Kirk and Mark Shafir, none of whom are now employed by Barclays. McDade, a former Lehman president, and Kirk, another longtime Lehman executive, left Barclays last year. Shafir never joined Barclays and now heads Citigroup Inc.’s M&A shop.
McDade, Kirk and Shafir couldn’t be reached for comment Friday.
Among those former Lehman executives who worked on deal and are employed by the U.K. bank are Lehman’s ex-investment banking chief Hugh “Skip” McGee, who now is head of investment banking at Barclays Capital; ex-treasurer Paolo Tonucci, now U.S. treasurer at Barclays; and ex-CFO Ian Lowitt, now chief operating officer of Barclays Wealth, Americas.
Attorneys for Alvarez & Marsal, the restructuring firm managing Lehman’s bankruptcy estate, have also questioned Martin Kelly, now CFO of Barclays Capital U.S.; Jim Hraska, now head of global financing operations at Barclays Capital; and Steven Berkenfeld, now a BarCap managing director.
It’s not too big a stretch to imagine a conflict of interest where these people were negotiating the sale of their company while also negotiating treatment of their existing employment contracts and new deals with Barclays.
Staying within the WSJ family, the Deal Journal put together an entertaining, animated graphic of where the Lehman personnel have ended up.
Two notable participants in the diaspora are Jim Seery, who was the Global Head of Lehman Brothers’ Fixed Income Loan business and went back to lawyering at Sidley Austin, and Thomas Russo, who was a vice chairman of Lehman Brothers Inc. and the Chief Legal Officer of Lehman Brothers Holdings and joined Patton Boggs as senior counsel.
Neither Seery nor Russo went back to his old firm, though. Russo was at Cadwalader before he went to Lehman. Seery was at some other firms that Sidley didn’t deign to identify – it’s not DLA Piper, that’s another Jim Seery. If you know where James P. was, let us know.
Related posts:
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
A whole passel of former Lehman lawyers just landed at Nomura.
A whole passel of former Lehman lawyers just landed at Nomura.
Thanks for a very interesting article.