This weeks A' hole

The jerk of the week at this point would seem to be Sam Zell. One year after this real estate tycoon bought Tribune for 8 billion dollars, he has just filed for bankruptcy. Why does that make him this weeks winner you ask? Well, in order to raise the money necessary to purchase Tribune, he set up a deal where he basically used the employees tax exempt stock option plan to borrow the money he needed to wrest control, contributing only 314 million of his own money. Though technically it made the employees the owners of the company, he was obviously in charge. He then cut back on employees 401k contributions in order to pay back the money he borrowed in his "tax efficient" little scheme. Only now that he is filing for bankruptcy, those stock options are probably going to be worthless, leaving the employees to bear the brunt of Tribunes 12.9 billion in debt compared to its 7.6 billion in assets. The only bright point is that because this was only going on for a year, employees wont lose as much as if they had been contributing to this for 7 or 8 years.

Thanks a lot.....dick