- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
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A rival bidder associated with Jones, First United American Cos., offered $3.5 million in cash, or twice as much cash as The Onion’s parent company. First United American is a limited liability company affiliated with Jones’ dietary supplements business, and its bid had Jones’ blessing.
How the fuck can that company possibly win a bid when it ought to be getting auctioned off to pay the Sandy Hook families too‽
They are business partners with Jones, they aren’t actually owned by Jones.
So Alex Jones is transferring Infowars to his pals so he can continue running the show under them?
He is trying to. I don’t think he will succeed.
Honestly this is straight out of the Infowars playbook. AJ has been fleecing racist morons with his pals for decades.
Please explain why you don’t think he will succeed. This seems like exactly what the fascists would do.
The Sandy Hook plaintiffs are owed $975 million. They are supporting the Onion’s bid by pledging as much of that as necessary to beat the opposing bid (remember, they have rights to most of the auction proceeds).
An analogy: you put something on eBay, and then decide you want to keep the item for yourself. You can easily outbid anyone else, because in the end you are (mostly) paying yourself. The only question is how much eBay’s tiny cut will be.
Well, Sandy Hook plaintiffs are basically putting Infowars on eBay but determined to win the auction. The winner of the auction is a foregone conclusion, so the only question is what small cut some other folks are going to get.
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Sounds like a bullshit asset-hiding scam to me.
Yeah, I really buy that. About as much as him saying he had nothing to do with AEJ holdings, or had no stake in the companies that his parents owned with him.
If he’s not got a direct financial stake in this, he’s got an under the table one. No one affiliated with Jones should be able to buy InfoWars.
Because it isn’t?
I’m pretty sure “because” isn’t a reason.
How the fuck can that company possibly win a bid when it ought to be getting auctioned off to pay the Sandy Hook families too‽
They’re not the company being auctioned. I honestly don’t know how to make that simpler…
“I don’t even think the $3.5 million is enough,” [the judge] said.
Cool judge, so you gonna put up the cash? Because last I checked there were only two bidders and the victims wanted the Onion out of the two.
Not only did they want them, the onion agreed to pay more to another lawsuit filed by a different group of parents than would have been given by the second bidder. This wasn’t the highest amount bid, but the highest payout to families.
I’ve been following this closely.
The normal way bankruptcy auctions go is basically some version of this:
- Everyone who wants to bid has to sign an NDA about the assets.
- Everyone who signs the NDA can perform their due diligence, look at financial statements and other confidential information about the assets in the auction, to figuratively kick the tires. If there’s actual physical property involved, bidders are generally allowed to physically inspect it (if it’s a tractor, for example, you can bring a mechanic to help sort out the tractor’s condition).
- Before the deadline, every bidder submits a secret bid to the trustee.
- The trustee evaluates the bids, looks to see which is best, and decides whether the top bids are close enough to hold a live public auction or allow topping bids for the bidders to say “hey you’re only $1 million short from the current top bid, you want to throw more money at this?,” and going around and around until the trustee is sure they’ve gotten the best and final bid from everyone.
The judge is upset that the trustee didn’t really do step 4, which in the bankruptcy process is designed to squeeze out the highest possible price for the sale. The losing bidder says they submitted a lower bid than their absolute top “best and final” they would have, because they thought they’d have an opportunity to improve the bid in a step that never happened.
So they’re going back to do it again. Presumably the trustee will propose a new auction process that explicitly puts out well defined rules on how creditors (like the Sandy Hook families) can credit bid with credit against their own claims, instead of actual cash. They’ll need to calculate exactly how much each dollar of credit bid brings to the non-participating creditors (like Sandy Hook families who don’t want to credit bid), and make sure that for each creditor who isn’t credit bidding gets the most money out of the sale.
I don’t think it’s over. The judge specifically said that he believes the trustee tried to do the right thing, but ultimately didn’t follow a process that was designed to raise the most money.
He thinks they didn’t do enough to get more from the bidding. The point of this bankruptcy option is not to punish Jones, it’s to liquidate his assets to pay creditors. The job of the person selling those assets is to get as much money as they can for those creditors.
Bullshit!
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That wasn’t the issue here. The issue here was inconsistency in the way the trustee handled the auction. An auction the trustee was given complete control over how to run by the court.
Even though there were no complaints at the time of the auction, from either party when the process was explained and processed. Only after the auction was over did the losing party (Jones’ puppet bidder) complain about it.
Found the person who doesn’t read the article
Weren’t they?
No, they had a lesser bid with the Sandy Hook victims taking lesser settlements to push up the value of TheOnions bid
Doesn’t that make it the highest bid?
Originally, yes, but this judge decided no
That’s not the issue - the losing company wasn’t given an opportunity to counter bid
Ftfa
The judge said Murray had acted in good faith in running the auction in which The Onion’s parent company initially appeared to prevail, but he said the trustee did not run a transparent process and should have given a rival bidder associated with Jones another chance to improve its bid.
It depends on how you count. Jones is unlikely to ever pay the full value of his debts, so the value of the victims forgoing their portion should be discounted proportionally.
I would comment on how the calculation was actually done, but federal courts do not allow for public recordings, and this court does not appear to make it’s written orders public either.
Imma be honest, between this and the CEO killing we’ve only really had two pieces of good news all fucking year and the same dipshits ruining everything are ruining this too. This plus being nonstop sick since August with several colds is really making 2024 the shittiest year (so far).
Can someone at least give us a piece of good news before the end of the year? Maybe something that tops both?
No matter what, that CEO is still dead.
Don’t worry, Muskie-poo will buy it and Trump will give him taxpayer money to run it as the official maga propaganda station.
Unions are getting completely overwhelmed with the number of active organizing efforts going on in the country.
That is promising news, at least. Thanks
I think evil has always had the upper hand in history, in some way or another. We didn’t get to this point on the backs of our best people.
What makes this new era so weird is that the bad guys have won so hard that it’s begun to trickle down to the stupidest, least creative, most inept evils in our society. They used to be the fodder we chewed through as a society to distract from the worse stuff higher up the chain.
Evil used to be clever.
deep down i had a feeling it was too good to be true
God fucking dammit
The good timeline peeked into this one for a second there. Can’t have that threat to Traditional Family Values Brand ™️ dystopia
Booooooooooo the justice system is corrupt AF in the US.
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