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Lehman 3/22
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Lehman Slams Objector's Appeal Of $1.5B JPMorgan Deal
Mar 22, 2016 | Law360
By Stewart Bishop
Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and its unsecured creditors on Friday asked the Second Circuit for an emergency order ending the appeal of a serial litigant's fight over a settlement with JPMorgan Chase & Co. worth almost $1.5 billion, calling the suit “utterly frivolous.” -
Wall Street’s Former Top Woman Tells Her Side of Lehman’s Collapse
Mar 21, 2016 | The Wall Street Journal
By John Carney
On St. Patrick’s Day of 2008, Erin Callan’s boyfriend, Anthony Montella, marched in the annual parade with the New York City Fire Department for the last time. He had asked if she could “sneak out for an hour to see him go down Fifth Avenue” in his dress blues. -
Looking Back at Lehman's Collapse With the Woman Who Fell Farthest
Mar 21, 2016 | Bloomberg Businessweek
By Sheelah Kolhatkar
As the financial system was teetering and about to collapse, Erin Callan had a prescient exchange with one of her colleagues at Lehman Brothers. -
See Ex-Lehman CFO Erin Callan, Then and Now
Mar 21, 2016 | Fortune
By Kristen Bellstrom
...Erin Callan was named CFO of Lehman Brothers in late 2007, just months before the onslaught of the global financial crisis.
Client Attorney Privileged/Attorney Work Product/At Request of Counsel
William Kuntz III Appeal
Erin Callan Memoir
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Lehman Slams Objector's Appeal Of $1.5B JPMorgan Deal
Mar 22, 2016 | Law360
By Stewart Bishop
Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and its unsecured creditors on Friday asked the Second Circuit for an emergency order ending the appeal of a serial litigant's fight over a settlement with JPMorgan Chase & Co. worth almost $1.5 billion, calling the suit “utterly frivolous.”
The deal, approved by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Shelley Chapman in February, resolves two of the three major pieces of litigation Lehman had brought against JPMorgan and, when combined with a related release of a debtor deposit, will result in a $1.49 billion payment to Lehman creditors.
A Massachusetts man, William Kuntz III, has filed a pro se appeal over the deal’s approval, alleging some connection between the Lehman case and the bankruptcy of Grand Union Supermarkets, as well as an unspecified holding in Lehman by the New York State Comptroller. U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan on March 11 dismissed Kuntz’s case and ordered him to appear on Thursday to explain why he should not be sanctioned. Kuntz subsequently filed a notice of appeal with the Second Circuit of Judge Sullivan’s order.
Lehman and its unsecured creditors committee asked the Second Circuit for summary affirmance of the district court decision, saying all of Kuntz’s claims in the Lehman bankruptcy have been expunged, and thus he lacks standing to appeal.
As Judge Sullivan noted, Lehman said, Kuntz not only made no showing that he has standing to pursue this appeal, but he also didn’t even attempt to argue that he has standing.
“Because the arguments raised by the Kuntz District Court Appeal had no basis in law, fact, or logic, he can have no reasonable hope of prevailing here, rendering this appeal frivolous,” Lehman and the creditors said.
Lehman and the creditors said Kuntz is a well-known “vexatious litigant and serial abuser” of the court system, pointing to a 20-year-old district court opinion written by now-U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor that said that Kuntz has demonstrated a consistent pattern of vexatious litigation and little respect for the courts or other parties.
Emergency relief stopping Kuntz’s appeal is warranted, Lehman and the creditors say, since JPMorgan has asserted a right to a final non-appealable settlement order before it will fund the deal, and Lehman and the creditors can’t afford the luxury of waiting for Kuntz to stop.
Kuntz could not be reached for comment. An attorney for the movants did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.
Lehman and the creditors said Judge Chapman on March 7 sanctioned Kuntz, saying the papers he filed concerning the settlement were filed for improper purposes, “including to harass, cause unnecessary delay, and needlessly increase cost.”
The settlement with JPMorgan relates to transactions that occurred in the runup to Lehman’s 2008 bankruptcy.
Lehman had claimed that in the final days before it filed for bankruptcy, JPMorgan used its “life or death” leverage as Lehman’s primary clearing bank to extract desperately needed liquidity as collateral to secure credit lines held by brokerage unit Lehman Brothers Inc....For full story: http://www.law360.com/articles/774391/lehman-slams-objector-s-appeal-of-1-5b-jpmorgan-deal
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Wall Street’s Former Top Woman Tells Her Side of Lehman’s Collapse
Mar 21, 2016 | The Wall Street Journal
By John Carney
On St. Patrick’s Day of 2008, Erin Callan’s boyfriend, Anthony Montella, marched in the annual parade with the New York City Fire Department for the last time. He had asked if she could “sneak out for an hour to see him go down Fifth Avenue” in his dress blues.
“That possibility was completely implausible, but he had no idea,” Ms. Callan—now Ms. Montella—writes in her new self-published book, “Full Circle: A memoir of leaning in too far and the journey back.”
Among the reasons for its implausibility was that Bear Stearns had just collapsed, necessitating an emergency sale to J.P. Morgan Chase that was announced the prior night, sending jitters through the financial system and prompting speculation that Lehman could face a similar fate. Ms. Montella, who Lehman Brothers had named chief financial officer a few months earlier, was scheduled to announce the firm’s quarterly earnings the following day.
Ms. Montella, 50 years old, also wasn’t the sort of person who prioritized her personal life over her work. The most important thing in her life was being a “Wall Street rock star.”
“Really, I was OK with throwing myself into the job because it was all that mattered to me,” she writes.
“Full Circle,” which was released Sunday on Amazon.com, tells the story of how Ms. Montella rose to become the highest-ranking woman on Wall Street in 2008, only to resign from the firm six months after being named CFO.
On the night before Christmas Eve 2008, after Lehman’s fall was complete, Ms. Montella was hospitalized after attempting to take her life by overdosing on sleeping pills, she writes. Shortly afterward, she left Wall Street altogether and all but vanished from public life.
In 2015, 6½ years after she left Lehman, Ms. Montella received a phone call from former Lehman chiefRichard Fuld. He said “every thing that I had wanted to hear for so many years,” she writes. He was sorry for leaving her alone on the March 2008 earnings call and he told her that she was the best person to be CFO.
Ms. Montella, a native of Queens, N.Y., graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and received a law degree from New York University. She began her career as a tax attorney for Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. She joined Lehman in 1995, where she would remain until her resignation in June of 2008.
Ms. Montella writes that she “drank the Lehman Brothers Kool-Aid.”
It is clear that she now looks back with regret that she let her career dominate her life during her Lehman years. Her subtitle is a reference to Facebook CFO Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead.”
“I was a case study in letting your career dominate your life, and it wasn’t a pretty picture,” she writes.
At one point, she describes her admiration for an investment-banking colleague who returned to work after two weeks of maternity leave. That was the way to have a baby, she thought: “It didn’t interfere at all. She didn’t fall behind with clients.
“I know now how screwed up my thinking was, but I wasn’t alone. It was a badge of honor,” she writes. Wall Street encouraged this type of thinking. There was “support for imbalance.”
When Joseph Gregory, then-president of Lehman, offered Ms. Montella the CFO position in February 2007, her reaction was “troubled.” She believed the job was too “operational” and not as important to the firm as client-facing activity. She accepted the position only after becoming convinced she could make the role more important, “something close to the CEO heir apparent,” she writes.
The earnings call in March 2008 was her first big public act as CFO. Despite the collapse of Bear Stearns, neither Messrs. Gregory nor Fuld participated in the call. Ms. Montella complains that this left her as a target after Lehman collapsed, while allowing Messrs. Fuld and Gregory to “distance themselves from the information given on the call.”
“Since I was the sole presenter on the call, every public statement about Lehman that was part of the speech and the Q&A is totally attributed to me. Just me,” she writes.
Later, Mr. Montella would tell her that rookie firefighters, known as “probies,” would never be sent into a blazing building first, much less alone....
For full story: http://www.wsj.com/articles/wall-streets-former-top-woman-tells-her-side-of-lehmans-collapse-1458600283
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Looking Back at Lehman's Collapse With the Woman Who Fell Farthest
Mar 21, 2016 | Bloomberg Businessweek
By Sheelah Kolhatkar
As the financial system was teetering and about to collapse, Erin Callan had a prescient exchange with one of her colleagues at Lehman Brothers. It was Nov. 29, 2007, and news that the co-president of Morgan Stanley, Zoe Cruz, had just been fired after her firm took a $3.7 billion loss on subprime mortgage securities was flashing across TV screens all over Lehman's trading floor. Joe Gregory, the chief operating officer of Lehman, popped into Callan's office. "Did you see the Morgan Stanley news?” Gregory asked. “The news about Zoe?” Callan, who was about to take over as Lehman's chief financial officer, was distressed. Cruz was one of the highest-ranking women on Wall Street. Without her, Callan would be left standing nearly alone as a female atop a male-dominated industry, like a weather vane attached to a roof that may or may not have been sound. The parallels with Cruz's situation were obvious.
"Zoe’s destiny was my possible destiny," Callan writes in a new memoir published Monday. "Her story was similar to my story in a big picture way."
Callan wrote her book, Full Circle: A Memoir of Leaning In Too Far and the Journey Back, to try to share the lessons she learned—painfully and publicly—about the dangers of prioritizing one's career ahead of everything else. She now sees that her total obsession with work and achievement came at the expense of everything else in her life, including meaningful personal relationships. Lehman turned out to be at the center of the financial crisis and ultimately filed for bankruptcy in September 2008. Callan had left the company months before, but she was still shamed and humiliated, her face appearing like a mug shot on newspapers across the country.
Without her high-octane career and the accolades that went with it, Callan writes, she felt completely lost. Her lowest moment came when she tried to overdose on sleeping pills and was rushed to Southampton Hospital on Christmas Eve.
Years later, Callan is happily married to Anthony Montella, a retired firefighter, and living a quiet life on Shelter Island and in Florida. After years of trying, they had a baby girl last year. Callan considers herself very lucky. The cover of her book, which she says she chose to self-publish rather than subjecting herself to the marketing gauntlet that would have come with a traditional book deal, shows the author cuddling her plump-cheeked daughter Maggie. It seems to be the image of a life fulfilled. While the cautionary work-life balance angle of the book is powerful, Callan's memoir will also serve as an important part of the historical record of what went wrong at Lehman and on Wall Street in general. It offers a case study of the sort of overachiever personality that thrives in finance, which carried Callan to the top of the industry.
But a certain kind of reader will be turning the pages for insight into Callan's hardest moments. She had been in the CFO job for three months in March 2008 when rumors and speculation about Lehman's exposure to subprime mortgage losses became increasingly intense. She, and she alone, was appointed to make Lehman's first-quarter earnings announcement on a conference call heard by thousands of skeptical investors. Bear Stearns had just been sold in an emergency bailout to JPMorgan Chase for two dollars a share, and the market was predicting that Lehman might be next. Callan's job was to try to reassure Wall Street that Lehman was fine by delivering remarks that had been carefully crafted, she writes, by many people at the firm. She felt completely overwhelmed—she was so new in her position that she barely had a grasp of Lehman's complex finances and mortgage-bond holdings. "Good luck," Dick Fuld, Lehman's chief executive, told her as she prepared to walk the gangplank. Later, after it became clear that things were markedly worse that she presented them at the time, Callan was accused of misrepresenting Lehman's health to its investors. She is still upset that Fuld and Gregory sent her to do the conference call on her own under such fraught circumstances.
"From what I understand in all the litigation and investigations I have been involved in over the last four years, I have heard secondhand that Dick and Joe have both suggested they don’t remember reading the earnings speech prior to the conference call," she writes. "They have also suggested they don’t remember actually listening to the call."...
For full story: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-21/looking-back-at-lehman-s-collapse-with-the-woman-who-fell-farthest
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See Ex-Lehman CFO Erin Callan, Then and Now
Mar 21, 2016 | Fortune
By Kristen Bellstrom
What a difference nine years makes.
Erin Callan was named CFO of Lehman Brothers in late 2007, just months before the onslaught of the global financial crisis. She was a blazing star of the banking world, briefly holding the coveted title of highest-ranking woman on Wall Street. In a 2010 feature, Fortune‘s Pattie Sellers described Callan as “a bright, glamorous figure, the likes of which Wall Street had never seen in a finance chief.”
Then the dominoes started to fall. Callan was pushed out in June of 2008. And following a short, ill-fated stint at Credit Suisse, she quit and vanished from public life.
Her sudden and mysterious disappearance from the business world makes her candid new memoir,Full Circle: A memoir of leaning in too far and the journey back, all the more shocking, as Sellers details in her review of the book, which was released today. Also surprising: Callan’s physical transformation from Wall Street chic to Florida mom.
Gone are the power bob and fashion-forward outfits—which Tina Sussman, once Callan’s personal shopper, described to the Wall Street Journal as “classic and elegant.” In her new memoir, Callan writes about former Lehman president Joe Gregory chiding her for wearing clothes that were “too provocative” and distracting when she was CFO and only woman on Lehman’s 13-person Executive Committee. “That’s what happens, I guess, when you have all men around the table for so long,” Callan writes....
For full story: http://fortune.com/2016/03/21/callan-then-and-now/
Client Attorney Privileged/Attorney Work Product/At Request of Counsel
William Kuntz III Appeal
Erin Callan Memoir
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