Daily Archives: May 12, 2004

Charles Miller to step down as UT Board of Regents Chairman

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Houston businessman Charles Miller announced today that he has submitted his resignation as chairman of The University of Texas System Board of Regents to Governor Perry.
Miller has served five years of a six-year appointment and will continue to serve as chairman until the regents elect a replacement to fill his unexpired term. Then Governor George W. Bush appointed Miller to the board in February 1999, and he was elected chairman in February 2001. Miller was re-elected chairman in 2003, and his term as a regent would have ended in February 2005.
In his announcement, Miller stated that he wanted to resign at this time so that the board had plenty of time to choose his successor ahead of the 2005 session of the Texas Legislature.
The UT System has 15 campuses, including nine academic and six health institutions and an enrollment of approximately 180,000 students. The system’s current annual operating budget is $7.8 billion. UT System institutions in the Houston are include UT Health Science Center at Houston, UT M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and the UT Medical Branch at Galveston.

Partial settlement in Enron employee class action

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This NY Times article reports on the $85 million partial settlement that has been in the works for quite some time in the Tittle class action lawsuit involving claims of former Enron employees who lost their shares in their 401K plans when Enron collapsed in late 2001 was filed today in U.S. District Court in Houston. Here is a copy of the plaintiff’s memorandum in support of the proposed settlement.
Enron employees lost hundreds of millions of dollars when the Enron stock in their 401(k) plan went up in smoke as the company slid into bankruptcy in late 2001. Under the settlement, the former employees may receive up to 10 cents on the dollar. Associated Electric & Gas Insurance Services Ltd., also known as Aegis, and Federal Insurance Co. will fund most of the settlement payment. Enron had $85 million in fiduciary liability insurance to cover company employees who were acting as fiduciaries.
The partial settlement resolves claims against Enron’s directors and human-resource staff, but does not settle claims against former Enron executives, Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling. The settlement also does not resolve claims against Northern Trust Co., who the former employees contend should have protected them in its capacity as trustee and a fiduciary of the plans, or Arthur Andersen, which was the auditor of the plans and Enron. Similarly, the settlement also does not release claims against Enron’s fidelity bonds, which cover losses to the plans caused by theft or dishonesty. Finally, the settement does not release the plans’ separate securities claims against Enron underwriters and investment banks.
The settlement will be presented for preliminary approval to U.S. District Judge Melinda Harmon Houston on May 20 in Houston. Plaintiffs still have some substantial hurdles to jump over in connection with Enron’s bankruptcy case in New York, where Enron’s creditors are contending (with considerable merit) that the former employees and retirees’ claims are subordinate to the claims of most other Enron creditors.

New Dallas stadium proposal

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Following up on this post from a couple of months ago on Dallas’ proposal to Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones to build a new stadium in Fair Park for the Cowboys, Professor Sauer posts this analysis of Jones’ counter-offer to Dallas officials — i.e., the cost of the stadium would be $650 million, with the Cowboys paying roughly a third and getting $425 million in public subsidies from Dallas County. The public financing would be paid in part by a 3% increase in the hotel occupancy tax, which would raise that tax to the nation’s highest of 18%. Jones argues that the stadium and surrounding commercial and residential complex (which would include hotels) would “drive business to the metroplex.”
With pragmatic clarity, Professor Sauer observes: “If I were a hotel owner and Jerry Jones was asking for a subsidy to compete with me, financed by a tax on my business, I’d be hopping mad.”
Stay tuned on this one. Although Professor Sauer’s skepticism is undoubtedly correct from an economic standpoint, my sense is that Jones will be able to play on Dallas public officials’ concern over falling behind Houston in the “stadium arms race” to get a deal done that involves a boat load of public financing.

New Texas Supreme Court Justice Scott Brister

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This Chronicle story reports on the bloodier than normal confirmation of Scott Brister as a new justice on the Texas Supreme Court. Justice Brister got 19 votes in the Texas Senate, exactly the two-thirds majority necessary to be confirmed. Nine Democratic senators voted against him, including Houston senators Rodney Ellis, Mario Gallegos and John Whitmire.
Justice Brister was appointed by Gov. Rick Perry last November to a vacancy on the Supreme Court. At the time of his appointment, Justice Brister was serving on Houston’s 14th Court of Appeals, where he was chief justice. Justice Brister also served on Houston’s other intermediate appellate court — the 1st Court of Appeals — and was a judge for the 234th District Court in Harris County for 11 years.
Despite the divisive politics involved in his confirmation, Justice Brister has a fine reputation among the Houston bar as a jurist, and he will be a valuable addition to the Supreme Court.

Bernard Lewis on U.N. involvement in Middle East

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Princeton University Professor Emeritus Bernard Lewis is America’s foremost expert on Middle East history, and prior posts involving his work and views can be viewed here. In this Wall Street Journal ($) piece, Dr. Lewis makes some typically insightful observations in regard to relying on the United Nations as an agent for progress in the Middle East:

The record of the U.N. in dealing with conflicts is not encouraging — neither in terms of fairness, nor of efficacy. Its record on human rights is even worse — hardly surprising, since the members of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights include such practitioners of human rights as Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Zimbabwe. In dealing with conflicts, as a European observer once remarked, its purpose seems to be conservation rather than resolution.
A case in point: In 1947 the British Empire in India was partitioned into two states, India and Pakistan. There was a bitter military struggle, and an estimated 10 million refugees were displaced. Despite continuing friction, some sort of accommodation was reached between the two states and the refugees were resettled. No outside power or organization was involved.
In the following year, 1948, the British-mandated territory of Palestine was partitioned — in terms of area and numbers, a triviality compared with India. Yet that conflict continues, and the 750,000 Arab refugees from Israel and their millions of descendants remain refugees, in camps maintained and staffed by the U.N. Except for Jordan, no Arab state has been willing to grant citizenship to the Palestinian refugees or to their locally born descendants, or even to allow them the rights of resident aliens. They are now entering their fifth generation as stateless refugee aliens. The whole operation is maintained and sustained by a massive apparatus of U.N. officials, some of whom have spent virtually their whole careers on this issue. What progress has been made on the Arab-Israel problem — the resettlement in Israel of Jewish refugees from the Arab-held parts of mandatory Palestine and from Arab countries, the Egyptian and Jordanian peace agreements — was achieved outside the framework of the U.N. One shudders to think what might have been the fate of the Indian subcontinent if the U.N. had been involved in its partition.

The Rocket continues to roll

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Roger Clemens continued his dreamlike hometown season as he hurled the Stros to their 10th victory in their last 12 games, 6-1 over the Marlins. The Rocket won his 7th straight game of the season, giving up only 3 hits, a walk and one run while striking out 11 in seven innings. For the first two thirds of the game, this was an old-fashioned late 1960’s-early 70’s pitching duel between Clemens and the Marlins’ Brad Penny, who dominated the Stros. However, Lance Berkman tied the game with a double to deep center off of Penny in the bottom of the seventh, and then Morgan Ensberg plated Berkman for the lead to secure the win for Clemens and send Penny to the showers. Bidg and the crew then put this one away with a four spot in the bottom of eighth.
Wade Miller takes the hill in an interesting matchup with the Marlins’ colorful Dontrelle Willis tonight at the Juice Box in the second game of this three game series.