United States District Judge Katherine Forrest of the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, has given final approval to the settlement reached in the case of Tronox v. Anadarko, Case No. 09-1198, by which Anadarko Petroleum Corporation agreed to pay $5.2 billion to settle the environmental and tort liabilities of the former Kerr McGee Corporation.
The case was filed by Tronox, Inc. and its affiliated companies as an adversarial case in its bankruptcy cases in the United States Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New York. The creditors of Tronox became the plaintiffs in the litigation after the Bankruptcy Court approved Tronox’s bankruptcy reorganization plan, which became effective as of February 11, 2011. Tronox claimed that Kerr-McGee Corporation’s spinoff of Tronox as an independent, publicly traded company, whose primary business was the manufacture of titanium dioxide, was a fraudulent conveyance, due largely to the vast environmental remediation responsibilities and tort liabilities assigned to Tronox in the spinoff. After the spinoff, Kerr-McGee Corporation sold itself to Anadarko for $18.4 billion in 2006.
In December 2013, the Bankruptcy Court found Anadarko liable, and suggested that the dollar amount of liability was between $5.2 billion and $14.2 billion. The parties announced a settlement for $5.2 billion, which the Bankruptcy Court approved on May 28, 2014.
The former environmental liabilities of Kerr-McGee are being managed by the government, which will utilize 88% of the $5.2 billion settlement for cleanups. At the time of Tronox’s bankruptcy filing, the company had over 2,200 environmental sites in various stages of remediation and/or litigation across the country.
For additional discussions of this landmark case and the legal issues raised in the lawsuit, stay tuned to this blog, or call Toni Ellington at (504) 599-8500.
No comments:
Post a Comment