Content area
Full Text
Sixteen borrowers under Conseco Inc.'s disastrous insider-loan program didn't hire high-powered attorneys to look for legal escape hatches or complain they'd been duped by former top brass.
They just paid up, and moved on.
That group has won the admiration of some shareholders, who've bristled in recent months as they've watched borrowers plot legal strategies aimed at extricating themselves from companyguaranteed loans they took out to buy company stock that is now virtually worthless.
Many of those shareholders were further irked this month when Conseco proposed a plan that would shrink loan balances for most of the more than 150 participants in the plan to a fraction of current levels.
As E. Whitney Drake, a semi-retired attorney from Virginia told IBJ last week, "They seem awfully willing to bail out some of these officers and directors, but leave shareholders high and dry."
Bankruptcy court papers disclose the 16 who paid. They ranged from former...