The executives at Kodak better check their latest batch of Reardon Metal, because the train bringing them a $13.5 million reward for putting the company into bankruptcy just jumped the tracks:
The trustee is an arm of the Justice Department charged with monitoring corporate bankruptcy cases. In a U.S. Bankruptcy Court filing Monday, the trustee says Kodak hasn’t shown, as required, that the bonuses it wants to pay won’t go to high-level insiders like Chief Executive Antonio Perez.
The other day I was talking to an attorney who does some bankruptcy work, and I learned that the bankruptcy trustee is usually a private attorney hired by the bankruptcy court who gets a cut of the money returned to creditors during the bankruptcy process.* So, the bonuses for Kodak executives are coming, in part, out of the trustee’s pocket, and, unlike the complacent board of directors, this attorney is going to fight those bonuses tooth and nail. Just imagine if there was some kind of third party who worked for corporations and got a percentage of the cuts they made in executive compensation plans. That would be socialism, and therefore impossible to implement, but it’s fun to imagine.