Sears sues former CEO Eddie Lampert for theft of billions from bankrupt retailer

cnbc.com

45 points·sakopov··6 comments

Hasn't it been public knowledge for quite some time that he was pilfering Sears?

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/yw94vg/why-the-brutal-dea...

Yes. I've been following this for years. Everyone just kept pointing to Amazon saying, "It's not the CEO it's just the state of retail." In numerous cases willfully or just naively ignoring what Lampert was doing the whole time.

It was an ongoing performance art in the farce of CEOs, executives, and corporate oversight.

I hope they get them, although we all know they are too rich to be successfully sued.

Headline on CNBC is less sensational, and includes "theft" in quotes.

The attribution "Sears" is also interesting, and equates to (I think) "Sears’ unsecured creditors". The claim that "Lampert was the cause of... Sears’ downfall" is a little wild-eyed, considering he "saved the retailer from complete liquidation" in 2004. In other words, Lampert ran the PE playbook, stripped Sears of its remaining value, and left creditors holding the bag.

He saved his PE investment in Kmart from liquidating by doing a PE buyout of the original Sears to create Sears Holding.

Between Amazon and Walmart, retail is certainly competitive at the moment, but private equity firms seem to have done their best to run companies like Sears and Toys R Us into the ground.

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