The final nail in O'Sullivan Industries' coffin was pounded in Monday by company officials when they announced the imminent shutdown of the Lamar facility.
More than 700 will lose their jobs, some immediately, others within the next several weeks. Not everyone paid a price for their involvement with the Newell Rubbermaid/Sharpie cabal that ran the plant, or with "turnaround expert" James Malone, who will be the company's final CEO.
According to documents filed March 21 with U. S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Georgia, the vultures hovering around the company following its October 2005 bankruptcy filing made a pretty penny at the expense of local workers.
These companies helped themselves to O'Sullivan money:
Dechert LLP, counsel to O'Sullivan- $2,098.929.25
Lamberth, Cifelli, Stokes & Stout, counsel to O'Sullivan $215,526
FTI Consulting, restructuring advisor, $1,834,836.25, plus $206,835.72 in expenses
Edward Howard and Company- (who you might recall submitted a payment request for the time it spent reviewing The Turner Report) $33,017.50, plus $428.61 in expenses
Lazard Freres & Co LLC, financial advisor- $2,812,500, plus $106,572.86 in expenses
Greenberg Traurig LLP, attorneys for Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors- $185,178.95, plus $5,936.87 in expenses
Chanin Capital Partners LlC, financial advisor for Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors- $450,000, plus E$34,035.34 in expenses
Sturman, Treister & Glatt PC, attorneys for Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors, $831,054, plus $81,007.63 in expenses.
Nice work if you can get it.
$8.9 million for the bloodsuckers and nothing for the employees! Great thing about all this is that their money was guaranteed either way. Bankruptcy work is swell if you can get it. This is on top of the guaranteed money that the penpals got, like $1 million per year for the messiah, er, Bob Parker. Then let's don't forget their largesse with entertainment and contributions to their pet causes.
ReplyDeleteYou should have met some of the guys they brought in to replace the old sales force. They made our worst salesman look like a rainmaker. They thought they were golden and that the relationships that had been forged were worthless. After all, they had been successful selling pens, right? Desks are the same, only bigger, or so they thought. Brought in their old cronies and tried to do things the same way as at Sanford. Never adapted. Surrounded themselves with yes men. I remember one finance person they brought in. She was from the islands, but I can't remember her name. Anyone who had the "pleasure" of dealing with her will remember her. She must have been 23 years old, freshly minted MBA. Spent her time talking down to the old regime. Think she learned that from the top. After all, they operated on the philosiphy that anything original to O'Sullivan was obviously wrong! They were clearly more innovative! Mike P never would have thought to make an RTA kitty litter box!!! He only knew how to come up with stuff that people wanted.
The Comapny was down to what, about $200 million per year in sales? Seems like everyone thought the answer was to load it down with more expenses and overhead. How did that new Atlanta site work out?
Funny thing is that you would have to have been deaf to miss the hoofbeats. Lamar is a great town and most of the employees were (and still are) good people. There is life on the other side! Best wishes to everyone as they deal with this challenge.
Anyone that could see was able to tell that once Bob and his Atlanta mafia took over that they were only interested in putting money in their pockets and to hell with everyone else. That they did well. And wow Bob really got to live a long time to spend it too. That was why I choose to leave a long time ago. We all could see what was going on and what would happen to Osullivans with them running it. And it is so true that they wanted yes people to work for them. If you agreed to everything they said then you got to move up the ladder, but if you were not a yes man, or a butt kisser to them then you got canned, or at the least demoted, and the guy that said yes to their every little whim got that job, or higher up. Regardless of how long anyone had been there, or the fact that the yes ones did not know how to do the job worth a poop. Those yes men turned into real jerks and treated all their employees like dirt. So to everyone of us that saw it coming a long time ago and got the hell out of there......good job. To the ones of you that got canned cause you did not kiss butt....be thankfull that you still have your dignity. To the ones that are still there and are about to get the axe....sorry for you all. But for the big dogs, and the yes men....you deserve everything you get that sucks in life. Lamar will survive, the always have. They will not let a bunch of money hungry men put the town under. Lamar will still stand tall and stand together
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