Johnson and Johnson have reportedly created a shell company (in Texas), moved all liability for asbestos being in their talc Baby Powder which prompted 38,000 lawsuits. That shell company, with limited assets, filed for bankruptcy last week. Is it possible that the Texas legislature has lost it's focus amidst all the social issue fights? Even in a pro-business state this should seem possible.
The concept of transferring responsibility between artifices as if it's a quantity in a bank account is ludicrous. It's not a system that needs to be fixed or reformed - the entire idea of having a system for this at all is messed up.
Translation - your side got its *** handed to them this year in the Texas Legislature on every single issue - guns, abortion, men playing women’s sports, forced vaccines, and vote by mail fraud. So whip out a piece from National Propaganda Radio and say the Legislators are all meanies. The Texas Legislature, which Nanny Bloomberg spent millions in a failed effort to turn it leftist, did exactly what they should have this year.
Thanks for the opinion. Now what do you think about J&J's strategy to avoid significant repercussions from having asbestos in their Baby Powder and hiding that fact for decades?
Don't know - tell ya what, since you brought it up, why don't you research the following and get back to us: What exactly is in their product? Does it actually cause illness and and has that been proven, or just trial lawyer claims? How did the chemicals in question get into their product? When did they know about it, and what was their response? How long has Texas corporate laws about product liability been in place? How do they compare with laws in other states? What impact will this have on various lawsuits around the country? The only actual comment you made was the insulation that the Texas Legislature was focusing on the wrong things this past year. Social issue fights are the entirety of the Democrat party's focus. They push race and sex issues non-stop. Then when they lose, they whine and say "Why don't you focus on making the trains run on time?" And the only members of the Legislature who weren't doing their jobs were the Democrat House members when they stumbled through their disastrous "Flee-bagger" escape to DC, where they violated Federal rules by not wearing their Wuhan's on the plane, then spread the virus to other elected officials, before eventually having to return in disgrace, and could do nothing to avoid Texas passing rules against vote-by-mail-fraud.
If the laws allow it, I can't blame J&J for doing it. However, the laws shouldn't allow it. An asbestos claimant has the right to have his or her case heard, and if the cases have merit, the entity that sold the product should be on the hook.
Businesses can sell, buy, or transfer assets or liabilities. In business, everything can be boiled down to a dollar amount. That's why they can sell patents, lawsuits, and even calculate goodwill in accounting. The article says a quirk in Texas law, which implies a) lawmakers didn't set it up for this and b) it doesn't have timing concerns with the social issue fights. That quirk is Texas defines merger to include “the division of a domestic entity into two or more new domestic entities or other organizations.” It sounds like a spinoff, but the difference is allocation of assets and liabilities (merger) and transfer of asses and liabilities (spinoff). The spinoff case should be an easy fraudulent transfer claim. Question is should the merger case also be considered a fraudulent transfer? I'd say yes.
Your mistake is trying to make the corporate shell game about asbestos as opposed to focusing on the process itself. This is not a new thing and I would basically guarantee it went on in the early litigation days of things like silicon implants and it went on with automotive litigation and basically anything else that involves multiple entities under a corporate umbrella. Hell, we saw it with Enron...they even made a movie about THAT one. Sorry you may not have been one of the seven people to watch it...it really IS a decent recantation of events. (side note, Enron was always a little more interesting since we had a client whose release plan was initially going to be to one of the higher ups (JS) who later went on to do federal time...and whose sudden lack of Texas residency meant our client had to come up with an alternate plan)
