The simmering dispute of control of Colony, Texas-based Pizza Inn, Inc. boiled over yesterday as the Pizza Inn board fired CEO Ronald W. Parker for cause, which is a nice legal way of saying that he’s being canned with no severance payment. This move comes on the heels of this earlier move by the board to authorize a company lawsuit against the Dallas-based law firm of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP for $7.4 million in damages for allegedly breaching its duties to the company in writing “golden parachute” severance package agreements for four senior Pizza Inn executives.

In his Wall Street Journal ($) Political Capital column today, Alan Murray reports that certain business interests that supported President Bush’s re-election are conducting a quiet campaign to persuade the White House to dump Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, William Donaldson:

The groups argue that the post-Enron crackdown on big business has gone too far, and now threatens to hurt the economy by discouraging companies from taking risks. Their hope is to replace Mr. Donaldson with a business executive who has a reputation for integrity, but also understands the problems that the corporate crackdown has caused for executives and their boards of directors. Mr. Donaldson, they argue, doesn’t.
The Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors and other business groups took an unusually active role in this year’s election, encouraging their members to reach out to employees and help register and turn out new voters likely to be sympathetic to the president. Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman has given them generous credit for helping to re-elect President Bush.
In return, these groups are now looking for some easing of the harsher regulatory and enforcement climate that has grown up in the wake of the corporate scandals. . . [business leaders are] particularly bothered by efforts by the SEC, and by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, to force large settlements out of companies by threatening charges.

But Mr. Murray notes that such matters are not discussed publicly because businessmen have become popular whipping horses:

The effort isn’t discussed much in public, and probably won’t get any attention at this week’s economic summit. That’s because polls show corporate executives still rank low in public esteem, and any effort to ease up on regulation or enforcement against them is likely to be politically unpopular.

As noted in prior posts such as this one, the Bush Administration has not been particularly friendly to business interests. In addition to the wayward SEC, the Bush Administration’s Justice Department has been particularly poor in exercising prosecutorial discretion regarding business matters. If the Administration is not responsive to business interests over this clear abuse of power, the Democratic Party will have a great opportunity to modify its traditionally anti-business policies and win over a business community that is increasingly disenchanted with the Bush Administration’s regulation of business through criminalization of merely questionable commercial transactions.

Following on this earlier post about a hedge fund beating Carl Icahn at his own game, this NY Times article reports that Mr. Icahn is now doing what any red-blooded American businessman would do when he ends up on the wrong end of an investment strategy — hire uber-lawyer David Boies and file a lawsuit.
Note to Mr. Icahn — if you lose your case in the trial court, make sure that Mr. Boies’ paralegal calendars your appeal deadline correctly.

H.R. “Bum” Bright, a longtime Dallas-based businessman, died Saturday night at his Highland Park home after a long illness. Mr. Bright was 84 at the time of his death.
Although Mr. Bright was best known for his ownership of the Dallas Cowboys NFL football club from 1984 to 1989, Mr. Bright was one of Dallas’ most prominent businessmen for many years and also a longtime member of the Texas A&M University Board of Regents, of which he was chairman from 1981 to 1985. A&M was one of Mr. Bright’s main philanthropic causes and the beneficiary of a $25 million gift from Mr. Bright during the mid-1990s’. Mr. Bright’s other main charitable cause was the Children’s Medical Center Dallas, to which he made a key $5 million donation in 1999 that led to the creation of a facility at the hospital that specializes in treating ear, nose and throat ailments.
Mr. Bright was trained as a petroleum engineer, received his degree from A&M in 1943, and made his first forture as the independent exploration and production sector of the oil and gas business. However, Mr. Bright proceeded to build an even bigger fortune in a nationwide trucking business, real estate, banks, and savings and loans. It was the investments in financial institutions that led to some of Mr. Bright’s most notorious business failures.
Mr. Bright lost about $30 million in the failure of RepublicBank Corp. in the late 1980’s, and another $200 million in the 1989 failure of Bright Banc Savings Association. Federal regulators seized control of Bright Banc during the costly cleanup that followed the collapse of the Texas savings and loan industry. Years of litigation over the failures ensued.
Mr. Bright’s influence was also substantial in the sports world. Mr. Bright engineered the process that resulted in the firing of Texas A&M football coach Tom Wilson and the hiring of Jackie Sherrill to a then record contract in 1981. Although Coach Sherrill returned A&M to prominence in the Southwest Conference and college football, he was forced to resign five years later under the spectre of NCAA violations that ultimately landed the A&M program on probation.
Similarly, Mr. Bright’s sale of the Cowboys to Jerry Jones in 1989 was the beginning of the end for legendary Cowboys coach Tom Landry, who was unceremoniously canned by Jones immediately after closing of the deal.
To say that Mr. Bright’s politics drifted toward the conservative side is an understatement. Not well known is that Mr. Bright was one of the co-sponsors of a full-page newspaper ad written by local members of the John Birch Society that sharply criticized President John F. Kennedy on the morning of the President’s visit to Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed the President in downtown Dallas later that day. Mr. Bright later stated that, despite the unfortunate assassination, he had no regrets about the ad because it simply reflected his political views.
Subsequently, Mr. Bright was one of the main financial supporters of fellow Texan John Connally‘s Presidential campaign in 1980, which raised and spent $11 million but flamed out after a few primaries. That $11 million expenditure could garner only one binding commitment from a GOP convention delegate. Mr. Connally left politics for good after that fiasco.
A private burial for Mr. Bright will be held at 2 p.m. Thursday, and a memorial service will be conducted at 4 p.m. Thursday at The Chapel of the Cross, 4333 Cole St. in Dallas.