Shrapnel from the explosion of the subprime market may yet produce a significant change in the way investors and their managers with a distressed-assets strategy maneuver for advantage in the context of chapter 11 proceedings. Specifically, a Bankruptcy Court’s refusal to confirm a plan in the Washington Mutual Inc. (WMI) reorganization proceedings may herald the rise of a new weapon – the “colorable claim” that a party with an interest prior to one’s own has engaged in insider trading – in the in-fighting among interested parties.
All is fair in love and war but it is impossible to avoid the impression that Judge Mary Walrath’s opinion could do a lot of mischief.
Background
WMI was a big part of the madness that we all fondly remember from the years 2007-2008. It was the holding company of Washington Mutual Bank (WaMu) back when WaMu was the country’s largest savings-and-loan association. As the subprime crisis became a more general banking crisis, depositors decided WaMu was a bad bet, and then withdrew more than $16 billion from their accounts in a ten-day period in the middle of September 2008.
On September 25, WaMu’s regulator, the Office of Thrift Supervision, seized the bank and appointed the FDIC as receiver. The FDIC immediately sold the bank to JPMorgan Chase through a hasty and, it turns out, rather sloppily drafted purchase and assumption agreement. It remained very unclear which assets belonged to the holding company, WMI, and which had passed through this seizure-and-sale into the hands of JPM. WMI filed a chapter 11 petition on September 26, and the resulting litigation has been even more-than- usually hard fought.
Refusal to Confirm
But we’ll fast forward three years, to September 13, 2011, when Judge Mary Walrath of the Delaware bankruptcy court refused to confirm the reorganization plan, because the holders of equity in WMI argued that four hedge funds, collectively referred to as the Settlement Noteholders, had engaged in insider trading, in other words that they had become insiders under the law when the Debtor provided them with confidential information during the course of negotiations toward such a settlement, and that there is at least circumstantial evidence that the Settlement Noteholders knowingly traded on the basis of this information.
How exactly are the two issues (insider trading and plan confirmation) related? The equity holders noted that bankruptcy law requires that a plan, to be confirmed, must be “proposed in good faith and not by any means forbidden by law,” 11 U.S.C. §1129(a)(3). They cited the alleged insider trades as a reason why the proposed settlement should be regarded as failing the good faith test. Strikingly, Walrath makes a point of rejecting this particular contention: “While the Court is not suggesting that the Settlement Noteholders be commended for their actions, the record shows their actions do not support a conclusion that the Modified Plan cannot be confirmed because it has been proposed in bad faith.”
The allegations of insider trading arise again much later in Walrath’s opinion, though, in the context of “equitable disallowance,” the authority of the bankruptcy court to disallow the claims of a wrongdoer, thereby expanding the size of the estate available to other claimants. Judge Walrath made no finding on the question whether there had been insider trading, and thus no finding disallowing the Settlement Noteholders’ claims. She did find, though, that the equity committee had made a “colorable claim” to that effect under both the “classical and misappropriation theories” of insider trading. She granted the committee permission to bring an adversary proceeding on that basis, but stayed any such proceeding pending efforts at mediation.
Scarce Precedent
Precedents for disallowance on the ground of insider trading would seem to be scarce – though Walrath cites a U.S. Supreme Court decision in its support, the decision is an old one, preceding the existing statutory language. It is the 1939 case of Pepper v. Litton, where the high court said that one who is in a fiduciary position with regard to a corporation “cannot utilize his inside information and his strategic position for his own preferment.” That was one of a list of principles such a person cannot violate. When these principles are violated, the Pepper court continued, “equity will undo the wrong or intervene to prevent its consummation.”
Walrath expressed her view that there will only be “extreme instances – perhaps very rare” when it will be necessary and thus appropriate for a bankruptcy court to invoke equitable disallowance. But evoke it (as the potential outcome of those “colorable claims”) she did, and if her assertion of this power holds up it will provide a new piece of munitions, of indeterminate charge, for use in future reorganizations.
The Settlement Noteholders have appealed to the District Court, contending that there are “fundamental errors of securities and bankruptcy law and violations of due process” inherent in Walrath’s opinion and order. They make the case for example that when Congress was debating the bill that became the existing bankruptcy statute, in 1978, it “considered – and then ultimately rejected – the inclusion of equitable disallowance as a remedy
http://allaboutalpha.com/blog/2011/10/19/wmi-reorganization-produces-potentially-disruptive-bankruptcy-decision/