Judges: The True Pension Referees in Bankruptcy Cases When a city is bankrupt, judges have a big say in whose bills will be paid. For now, all eyes are on Detroit and San Bernardino, Calif. Caroline Cournoyer | November 2013
Two battles over public money promises are intertwined in two cities, two states and two courtrooms. In Detroit and San Bernardino, Calif., past promises to fund public pension plans and other retirement benefits have become inextricably linked to the impossibility of paying those obligations. Each of the cities could pay its promised benefits today, but not all of its other obligations. Indeed, the cities may be able to pay off their promises to any given creditor or any set of obligations, but not all of them. The problem is not the pension obligations, per se, nor any other particular liability. Rather, it’s the obligations combined with reduced revenue bases.
PBGC’s rights to assets from former plan sponsor upheld
Bloomberg
A federal appeals court in Florida has backed the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. in its legal bid to go after the owner of a company that took more than two decades to shut down its pension plan. From the confluence of bankruptcy, employee benefits and corporations law comes this most unusual case, wrote Judge Richard C. Tallman for the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Miami in the Nov. 24 order upholding a U.S. District Court s 2019 judgment for the PBGC.
The PBGC filed the case in July 2018 to collect unfunded benefit liabilities it was owed when the Liberty Lighting Co. Inc. Pension Plan for IBEW Employees, Chicago, was terminated and taken over by the agency, and for premiums owed to PBGC because of the termination. The lawsuit also sought to recover any property fraudulently transferred while Liberty and other companies owned by Joseph Wortley were winding down.
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
No one is rooting harder for President Trump to lose and go away than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Mr. Trump has made a sport of schooling Mrs. Pelosi and her radical Democratic allies. There was the border wall controversy, where she said she would give him $1 and he ended up with at least $11 billion for wall construction. There was her impeachment of Mr. Trump, which she held for a month for dramatic effect, only to find Americans became even less interested in her case over that time to the point the Senate laughed the case out of court.