The bankruptcy of fractional-share operator Avantair triggered a dispute regarding exactly what property its fractional-share owners held. Like other fractional-share operators, Avantair operated a fleet of airplanes, selling fractional shares in each of them to individual participants. Using Fractional Share Contracts consisting of interlocking purchase agreements, dry lease agreements, and fractional use agreements, Avantair controlled, operated, and maintained a fleet of aircraft owned by its participants.
The "American rule" is a well-defined legal principle applied by courts throughout the United States that holds each party to a dispute responsible for paying its own attorney fees. This principle is, however, subject to a number of exceptions that effectively allow a prevailing party to recover its own attorney fees from a losing party. For example, federal and state statutes increasingly authorize a prevailing party to recover costs from its adversary in certain types of actions.
Who are we kidding? The topic of statutory insiders has been a blog favorite, year after year.
In Part I of our entry on Weinman v. Walker (In re Adam Aircraft Indus.
One deliberately ironic facet of the 2004 film Howard Hughes bio-pic The Aviator (the one with Leonardo DiCaprio) is the fact that the airlines fighting for world dominance in the 1940s were Howard Hughes’ TWA and Juan Trippe’s Pan Am. By the time of the movie, of course, both famous airlines were gone. Pan Am’s final descent into bankruptcy court ended in 1991. Following its own troubles (and two bankruptcies in the 1990s), TWA was acquired by American Airlines in 2001. But does the death of an airline mean an end to litigation? Of course not.
An executive’s right to severance payments isn’t always written in stone, even if his employer agrees to provide them. In this post, we described how one exec lost his severance pay after the Federal Reserve decided that his employer, a bank, was in a “troubled condition” at the time.
On September 12, 2013, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that American Airlines, Inc. (“American”) had the right to repay $1.3 billion in debt (“Notes”) without payment of a make-whole amount.1 The Second Circuit dismissed all of the arguments raised by U.S. Bank Trust National Association (“U.S.
On 13th August 2013, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and attorneys general from six US states and the District of Columbia filed suit in the US District Court for the District of Columbia to block the merger between US Airways and American Airlines. Days before, a group of American Airlines customers filed a claim that the merger would violate Section 7 of the Clayton Act.
American Airlines’ CEO, Tom Horton, moved one step closer to receiving the $20 million severance payment he’s negotiated with the bankrupt airline. On Tuesday, the bankruptcy judge hearing American’s case allowed the payment to stay in the airline’s disclosure statement (approval of the statement is a predicate step to ultimately “reorganizing” and exiting bankruptcy). The approval c
You might think that a company in bankruptcy wouldn’t be able to give its CEO a multi-million-dollar severance payment.
But just because a company is in bankruptcy doesn’t necessarily mean it doesn’t have any money – it just means it doesn’t have enough to pay all of its debts, or to function as a continuing concern. The company may, in fact, have the means to make a rather generous severance payment – like the $20 million American Airlines is proposing to pay its CEO, Tom Horton, as the airline comes out of Chapter 11 and into a merger with US Airways.