The New York Post reports that Chrysler CEO Bob Nardelli “transferred a $3.8 million, four-bedroom, five-bath Los Angeles spread to his wife, Susan, on Jan. 17, 2008, according to deed records filed in Los Angeles County and recorded with the Assessor’s Office on Feb. 5, 2008.” There are only three possible reasons for this move: divorce, estate planning or a hedge (there’s that word again) against future legal action, when creditors come to call. Strangely, or not so strangely, Bob’s personal spinmeister is denying the facts of the matter. “A spokeswoman for Nardelli early today insisted the records were incorrect and no transfer took place.” The story gets curiouser and
curiouser . . . .
The Post reports that the official documents “strangely” identify Robert Nardelli as a married woman. Susan Nardelli is the official buyer of a sale listed as an “interfamily transfer and dissolution.” Bob Nardelli’s PR flack Lori McTavish admitted that “The documents obtained by the New York Post reflect several inaccuracies.” As a further demonstration of Cerberus’ well known talent for splitting hairs with inquisitive journalists, she also insisted that “Mr. Nardelli’s name was never on the deed. Therefore, a transfer of the property did not take place.” Ipso, huh?
Anyway, “Any suggestion of impropriety is completely unfounded and inappropriate.” Yeah, propriety’s a bitch. So to speak. And while you’re thinking about that and all those tens of thousands of jobs that are going away, here’s a MS Virtual Earth link to an aerial shot of the Nardelli’s Atlanta pad (is that a horse arena?).
I think it is the latter, rather than the former.
Oh yeah, county workers just sit around and transfer property for the fun of it…..
John
Sorry for nitpicking, but Google gets too much credit sometimes. The link to Nardelli’s Atlanta pad is using Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, not Google. Not sure, but I don’t think Google Maps has a bird’s eye function.
And I agree with ReGZ_93. This ownership transfer is definitely meant to protect himself and his family.
Needless to say, his attorney and he had a big heart to heart after he spoke to the board and his CFO, and this action (if true) was an obvious defense in terms of ensuring he can’t lose his home. I’d say they realize that Chrysler’s goose, is cooked. It’s only a matter of time. (Blame it on those “dang customers” – recalling that the only customers that Chrysler, or any other car company, has are their dealers). They “should be buying cars”. Yeah, right, Chrysler. They’ve already got 6 months worth of stuff on their lots….
But looking at it in one sense, since he did not actually put his own home up as collateral, just why would anyone in their right mind think that he should lose it anyway?
He is not a public official (elected), so how can anyone claim malfeasance on his part?
Notice the “LLC” behind Chrysler? That means “Limited Liability Company” and that actually protects management from having personal goods taken in case of corporate default or bankruptcy.
Put yourself in his shoes; would you want to lose your house to some bingo the clown judge making shit up as he (or she) goes along?
That’s what our country is rapidly devolving into for ALL of us, and the payback is going to be a be-atch. Pull a massive rubber band hard one way, and once you accidentally let go – guess what happens?
I am not familiar with the American legal system, but my understanding is that these 11th hour transfers can be unwound if they are deemed to be an obvious attempt to dodge creditors. Which it is.
No, that ain’t a horse arena.
It is the storage facility for his ego….
menno: I think your ‘rubber band’ analogy is perfect. Though I don’t think ‘going after CEOs’ would cause such snap back (unless carried too far), I think the ‘holding CEOs and other management accountable for their actions’ is the logical snap back from the decades of increasing greed and malfeasance that have grown out of control in this country.
The Post reports that the official documents identifies Robert Nardelli as a married woman.
If the documents identify Mr. Nardelli as a married woman, saying that it has “several inaccuracies” is the understatement of the century.
Either that, or Mr. Nardelli is the 21st century version of Elizabeth Carmichael pushing a new Dale…
I believe menno is correct.
LLC creates a firewall between the company and the shareholder. No financially savvy person would personally own a company and expose his personal assets to a lawsuit settlement. The shareholders loss is limited to the value of the shares held. It is my understanding that LLC can only be used for a small number of shareholders. That is why you don’t see GM, LLC because they have many thousands (millions?) of shareholders and the LLC legal entity cannot be used for that many people.
Wait, it says “2008.”
If he was doing this LAST January it hardly counts as an 11th hour transfer.
Of course, he knew Chrysler was dead last year, but you’d never get a court to reverse it.
1. I think you mean 2009, not 2008.
2. While I’m all about criticizing the bailout, I’m not fond of instigating class envy by posting pics of Mr. Nardelli’s house. He earned his income (mostly unrelated to the auto industry, anyway), according to the Board of Directors at The Home Depot.
3. Having said that, he shouldn’t have to lose his house just because the company could fail. Chrysler’s path was set long before he came along.
I think SexCpotatoes is more right than menno in his take on our present social situation. Throughout history, when small groups have concentrated wealth and gathered more and more power in a society, revolution ensues (see France, Russia). The heads of corporations have been gobbling up money and cutting jobs at every opportunity and manipulated the political and social systems to grant themselves more pay, less oversight and lower taxes. The rubber band has been pulled far in their favor and I think it’s about damn time that incompetent boobs like the Wall Street wizards that got us in this position received comeuppance rather than bailouts. Same goes for Wagoner and his pack of idiots, granting themselves fat bonuses while steering their company into failure.
Menno is right, however, that Cerberus is an LLC and thus Nardelli’s property should be protected from actions related to Chrysler’s performance. I can’t think of any constitutionally-compliant situation that would end up with Boot ’em Bob having his property taken away as a result of a Chrysler bankruptcy. Regardless of that, I wouldn’t mind very much if some whacko judge took away the $210 million he got for ruining Home Depot and then made him live in a shack made of turds for being such a shitty corporate marauder SOB. In the meantime, I hope he enjoys his new tennis court.
tced2 – a corporation is already limited liability – you cannot lose more than you paid for the shares.
An LLC is for organizations that do not publicly sell shares but want the liability benefits.
My bad on the Google attribution. Thanks for the heads-up. Text amended.
gslippy, if you actually believe that Nardelli earned his income, you must be from Planet Crazy. His astronomical compensation was a result of the Wall Street boys club, where CEOs sit on each others’ boards and vote themselves absurdly generous pay packages, and certainly not the result of any “hard work” on his part. I fully believe that people who start up a business and see it to great success deserve to be well compensated, but the kiss-ass dirtbags who climb their way to the top of a company don’t deserve the same pay as someone who built the company from nothing.
Don’t give me the “people deserve what the market will pay them” bullshit. The Unions have shown that the market can be warped and bring a company to it’s knees and now the executives have done the same. The market is skewed and doesn’t reflect true value. There is no way in Hell that someone who did to stockholder value what Nardelli did to Home Depot earned a $210 million severance package.
If Chrysler flops under his watch, Nardelli surely will be in the CEO hall of shame. His stay at Home Depot already puts him in contention.
Hey, Nardelli were is the Sebring’s replacement. What happened to project D?
You have aligned accountability and the rubber band theory to point, and there are many on board with this. I truly wish people were not so easily talked into mortgages they had no business getting into. So it goes hand in hand with those who allowed the said mortgages to be made accessible. Keeping up with the Jones, why, is it some status thing or just a learned trait?
It’s interesting that my military friends always referred to GM as, “the little government” and look at them, even before it all the hit the fan.
Stop paying the taxes that support Chrysler’s welfare and keep Nardelli’s horrible, bankrupt investment alive and see what happens to your house.
As others have pointed out, Chrysler is an LLC. The only way Nardelli could be held personally liable is if he committed fraud or some other crime in his management of Chrysler. Which this transfer tends to indicate.
He must have pilfered quite a lot of plywood and tools from Home Depot to build a mansion like that. No wonder they gave him $200M to go away, stock loses must have been huge during his tenure.
Didn’t he say he put quite a bit of his own cash into Chrysler … Could there ever be some sort of claim against insider dealing for him as an investor separate from him shielded as an officer of the company ?
In the spirit of what some of you seem to desire for the wealthy amonst us, I offer this up:
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/09/galbraith-and-keiser.html
The question is, if we do what the French did a few hundred years ago and lop off their heads, are we any better than the crazed Islamists who just cut off the head of that Polish engineer they captured?
I’m not saying the wealthy have been doing the right thing in essentially gobbling up all that they have; greed is evil and has nasty consequences.
But, two wrongs simply don’t make a right.
Besides, if you take 10 minutes to listen in to this, you might realize our problems are deeper than we think.
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/09/rep-kanjorski-550-bi.html
Now might be a real good time to pray, if you believe in God.
But the truth is, we’ve made this bed on a collective basis, and we all get to pay the fiddler (to mix metaphors).
menno:
What people want for the wealthiest among us is simply the same criminal and financial culpability for their crimes and misdeeds that the least wealthy among us have.
Nardelli, I assure you, is incredibly well represented. If ever tried he will not be found guilty of anything that he did not do, and he will likely be found innocent of things that he has done. He will do everything possible to taint the jury, and anything he is convicted of will be appealed.
Using one of a person’s mansions to satisfy a judgment, if they are found guilty of financial fraud or other crimes, is in no way equivalent to indiscriminately chopping off heads. An evolved legal system, with defense attorneys and appeals, designed as well as possible to only punish those that have committed wrongs is what sets us apart from radical Islamic countries, not what makes us like them. By hiding his assets Nardelli is putting himself above the law like a Saudi Prince.
If you are worried about injustice there are a large number of legal defense funds that I can recommend for you to contribute to for people that are less well represented than Nardelli.
I want a regulated, capitalist economy. The viability of that requires everyone to be culpable, including the rich. If the rule of law breaks down, and people rise above culpability, then society breaks down.
Show me a country where income inequality spiraled out of control and the wealthy rose above the rule of law and I will show you a country where there was a Communist Revolution.
Speaking of God; Matthew 19:23-24:
“Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.\'”
I personally think that’s a bit harsh, but losing a mansion if one has committed a crime isn’t.
Once again, well said, no-slushbox.
BTW, did you know that the eye of the needle was a literal place? It was the smallest entrance into the city of Jerusalem, only wide enough for a man or donkey to go through one-at-a-time.
The biblical reference means to say that, in order to get through, one has to actually take their worldly goods off (the donkey, literally) to get through.
Spiritually speaking, of course, we don’t take our “things” with us once we die; obviously they are also left behind. But the biblical reference is deeper than that; it also means that if you worship your “stuff” (which is something that the wealthy do quite readily), there is no way to get into paradise because you’ll be standing at the (pearly) gates wanting to take your prior position, attitudes gained from living in ill-gained wealth, influence, etc. in with you.
No can do….
I’m not defending the indefensible, but on the other hand, there are an awful lot of common garden variety folks out there who are just as equally guilty of stealing as these wealthy folks.
It’s just that these layabout theives “hire” politicians to (supposedly legally) pick the pockets of the folks who work for a living.
This is also known as “socialism”.
Have a read for a taste of the lash-back which is already starting.
http://www.michnews.com/JB_Williams/Okay_You_Want_Socialism_Then_YOU_Pay_for_It.shtml
menno:
Thanks for keeping it civil, I think we’re on the same page on many things, particularly the auto bailout that actually has a tangential connection to this site.
There have been attempts to reinterpret the needle passage (as I said, the rich always have good lawyers), but a conservative Judge would say that clear passages should be interpreted on their face, using the meaning of the actual words and phrases, and not relying on other sources or inferences.
Scalia would likely say that the existence of a place in Jerusalem called “the eye of the needle” is quite likely coincidental, and should not be used for interpretation. Especially since Jesus said “the eye of a needle”, not “the eye of the needle.”
I oppose socialism in the traditional meaning (a non-violent Communist Revolution), and do not think the government should own manufacturers or any other successfully competitive industries.
On the other hand, I am for equality of opportunity (as opposed to outcome), and I think the government runs the roads, police, fire department and military better than any private company could. So I support many things that a libertarian would label with “socialist” rhetoric.
Nardelli received his undergraduate and MBA degrees from public, taxpayer funded universities. While he may be a thief I don’t consider him a thief for that.
All of the recent government socialism (the bank bailouts, the auto bailout, etc.) has consisted of rich people stealing from the poor and middle class. So the poor are getting rather poor service from the thieves that they supposedly hired.
menno, I don’t think the last link you provided is really a valid or credible news/opinion source (of course all opinions are valid but the supporting “facts” and examples are ridiculous in the article). I’ve heard it said elsewhere that socialism is a political system which can exist pretty nicely alongside capitalist enterprise. My personal view of socialism is, at the end of the day, a government that plays a more active part in defending the interests of it’s citizens than American-style democracy tends to. It is in no way Marxism, and to imply that socialists want to go to the rich peoples houses and march out with all their treasures is completely false.
I really bristle when people try to argue that socialism is just communism by another name. Communism isn’t even an inherently evil system; it’s Soviet-style communism, where the government spies on its own people and silences detractors, where freedom of speech is limited and party members grant themselves privilege, that is terrible. In a perfectly ethical world, a communist model ensures all citizens are afforded at least the means to live. In the real world, people are selfish and corrupt and they take advantage of what should be a good clean-operating political system. Similarly, laissez-faire or lightly regulated business practices tend to lead to massive inequities where, oh, just to pull an example out of the air, the CEO of a company makes 400x what the average worker makes.
Socialism is in no way Soviet-style Communism. Socialists are not fat lazy welfare queens who want to steal Bentleys from the rich so they can drive to the grocery store and use foodstamps. It is false and disingenuous to imply that socialists are layabout thieves who want to live off the backs of hardworking folk. It is equally false and disingenuous to imply that our president is any measure a socialist. Don’t be silly, Socialism is a very workable political system that has seen success in many (the majority?) civilized, successful countries around the world.
Mr. Nardelli’s estate here in Atlanta is at 1307 Swims Valley DR NW, 30327 in the exclusive “Buckhead” area. 30327 is the second wealthiest zip code, here in the state of Georgia. Second only to reclusive Sea Island.
Several counties in this state have put property records online, including Fulton. However try as I might, I can not get this address to come up. I do see that the neighboring homes are in the 3 million + range, one of which belongs to Francis & Linda Tarkenton.
I think it would be most interesting to see if there had been any “recent activity”. Most interesting indeed.
What’s going on in the USofA these days? What a sorry place it seems to be.
By researching and revealing this stuff (more than 12 months old) what public interest is served? Nardelli might be having marital problems? Nardelli might have invested in Cerberus and is likely to lose the lot? Is what he has done illegal?
On the other hand, there needs to be systemic change of a system that lets people artificially remove their assets from access, but it seems railing against the individuals isn’t helping anyone.
Probably got something to do with the $50mil he allegedly gave Cerberus to get the job in the first place.
The LLC does nothing to protect Nardelli if he has been involved in something illegal or that violates his fiduciary duty(s) as CEO…
What is this capitalism of which you speak? It has not existed in the US for a long time. The worthless POS’es on Wall Street and in Deadtroit have socialized the consequences of their failures and privatized their personal rewards. Of course the mood is ugly – it would be less so if they’d taken the hit like good capitalists, but they were cowards regarding the personal economic consequences of their failures.
OTOH, I read somewhere that socialism is the idea that much of the population is just too damn stupid to manage certain aspects of their own affairs and that therefore government must help them. By extension, the best and brightest, who all enter sacred government service with only the purest of motives, will conclude that ‘certain aspects’ are really just about all aspects. In so doing, they waste lives – their own as minders, and the lives of those who they mind.
We have squandered the wealth of our country and we need productive people to restore it – people who know how to dream up things and make them real. Lawyers, bankers/financial consultants and community organizers need not apply. They have little to contribute.
more bonus points for red ink Rick
at least he lives in town and doesn’t have to spend all that time commuting