> Before the bankruptcy filing, J&J faced costs from $3.5 billion in verdicts and settlements, including one in which 22 women were awarded a judgment of more than $2 billion, according to bankruptcy court records.
Around the same time as the LTL shenanigans, on 2022-09-14 J&J announced a $5billion stock buyback[0]. It's not that J&J didn't have the money which led them to do the "Texas two-step" and push liability to their soon-to-declare-bankruptcy LTL subsidiary. They just wanted to line their pockets with the money instead. Isn't that pleasant.
None of this strikes me as nefarious. The point of the bankruptcy filing wasn’t to bilk creditors. It was to get them all equal payouts instead of a bunch of random jury-dependent judgment amounts.
The problem with doing something illegal is that the consequences of your actions include having to pay out a bunch of random jury-dependent judgement amounts.
Great, if you’re in the first random set of plaintiffs who get billions of dollars. Not so great if you’re a later plaintiff when the money’s all gone and the company is bankrupt for real.
Around the same time as the LTL shenanigans, on 2022-09-14 J&J announced a $5billion stock buyback[0]. It's not that J&J didn't have the money which led them to do the "Texas two-step" and push liability to their soon-to-declare-bankruptcy LTL subsidiary. They just wanted to line their pockets with the money instead. Isn't that pleasant.
[0] https://www.jnj.com/:~:text=NEW%20BRUNSWICK,%20N.J.,%20Sept.....