DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Tailgate Forum Browns owner Jimmy Haslam being investigated over Berkshire Hathaway bribery claims

Need mo money to pay DW, lol.

NY Post

Browns owner Jimmy Haslam being investigated over Berkshire Hathaway bribery claims

Browns owner Jimmy Haslam is being investigated over claims from Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway that he attempted to bribe employees of Pilot Travel Center to boost profits this year with the intent of reaching a greater sale price of the business.

A lawyer for Pilot revealed that Haslam is being probed by federal prosecutors during a hearing in a civil suit between Haslam and Berkshire, Bloomberg reported earlier this week.

Berkshire began acquiring Pilot, a chain of truck stops and gas stations, in 2017, and currently owns 80 percent of the company.

The Haslam family has an annual option to sell the remaining 20 percent of Pilot based on a valuation of 10 times the previous year’s EBIT (Earnings Before Interest and Taxes), a common measure of profit.

While this would seem to be pretty straightforward, the sides are at odds based on accounting methods and different incentives.


In the short run, Berkshire would prefer the profits and thus the required purchase price to be lower, whereas the Haslam family would want the opposite.

Haslam, the son of Pilot founder Jim Haslam, did not respond to a request from Bloomberg about the apparent federal investigation, but his attorneys vehemently denied the claims when they first arose.

“We called Berkshire’s allegations wild inventions in our opposition brief,” Haslam family attorney Anitha Reddy said earlier this month, according to the Associated Press. “I don’t think we could have been clearer that we dispute them. And if there is any doubt in Berkshire’s mind, we think they’re false and we intend to defeat them on whatever schedule the court orders.”

W
The AP had previously reported that Berkshire alleged that Haslam had tried to bribe “at least 15” Pilot executives with millions of dollars for there to be higher profits at the company in 2023.

In more welcome news for Haslam, prosecutors in the civil case ruled that Berkshire’s claims of bribery were not relevant to the case, according to Yahoo Finance.

The Haslam family filed the original suit alleging that Berkshire was pushing down profits.

Pilot got in hot water last decade when it was discovered the chain had systematically shortchanged high-volume trucking customers out of their promised fuel rebates.

The company was forced to pay $92 million in criminal penalties.

Haslam denied knowledge of the scheme and was not prosecuted for it.

The story about Haslam bribing someone seems made up and retaliatory, especially since the accusation wasn't made until after Haslam sued Berkshire.

My guess is he comes out of this unscathed.

That could well be. I hope the feds review this quickly. Here are more details of the allegations.

Bloomberg

Hey, it's an accusation, so it must be true, right? To quote some politicians from a few decades ago, it's not the validity of the evidence, it's the seriousness of the accusation.

Who knows? Just billionaires in a slap fight.

Have fun in the clink, Little Jim.

If Haslem goes to jail what happens to the team? Dee (wife) would take charge??

His son in law or his daughter take over.

If anybody has sold anything, the seller tries to inflate the price as much as possible and the buyer tries to devalue the item as far as possible.

What one calls bribery, another calls it an employee incentive program.

You are correct. Criminal activity sounds so much better when you sugar coat it.

Can you prove it is criminal activity? You know that companies offer bonuses based upon company performance, right? In my job I didn't get bonuses, maybe you did, maybe you didn't, I have no clue. None the less, it is pretty common for various level employees and investors to receive added benefit when a company performs well.

Like you said in an earlier post, it's just billionaires bickering over money. It might be big money, but it's no different than when I bought my first car and bickered over $300 or $250.

I know you remember when you could actually buy a running, fairly decent car for $150. It might not have been high styling, but it started and took you down the road for a year or two.

...and if you knew the seller, he'd let you make payments!

I suppose. I never bought a car from someone I knew. The closest was a friend of mine knew a guy selling a car.

Once again that's a nice way of trying to view something that you or I would be found guilty of. But isn't that how the court system works? One side presents the facts of what happened and the other side does their best to defend against those facts based on an attempt to make those facts look as though they should be acceptable behavior? And the better lawyers you can afford to hire the better the story you can manufacture.

We're not buying a car here. I have no idea what you were trying to accomplish by such an analogy.

I took it down to as simple of a comparison as possible. One party wants to inflate the value as much as possible, the other wants to reduce the value as much as possible.

How do you know which side is presenting the “facts”?

What i know is this isn't the first time Haslam has been involved it shady business dealings with Pilot. I'm not saying he's guilty. I'm also not the one trying to sugar coat the allegations.

Your posts indicate otherwise.

You can read it any way you want to but that doesn't change the fact that I never said he was guilty. Explaining someone is trying to sugar coat what he was accused of isn't the same thing. Hopefully you find that helpful.