Word: morrison
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...most daunting news was that the company would report a loss of $310 million for 1994, stemming in large part from its troubled railcar business. That was nearly twice the deficit that Morrison Knudsen acknowledged as recently as February. To make matters worse, the firm remained in technical default on $225 million in loans from Bank of America, J.P. Morgan and other lenders. "We are beginning to seriously doubt the company's viability," says analyst Tobias Levkovich, who follows the firm for Smith Barney...
...remote control from a linkside villa. Agee has his defenders, although few of them are willing to speak on the record. Far from hiding problems from the board, his supporters say, the deposed chairman reported them as quickly as they came to light. Many of the woes involved Morrison Knudsen's transit division, which Agee had been trying to build up since 1990. The strategy seemed sound at the time: Agee believed that the Buy America movement, coupled with Morrison Knudsen's position as the only U.S.-owned manufacturer of railcars, would make the business highly profitable. "He did have...
...just a terrible thing that the directors and the outside auditors could have let a thing like this happen," says Velma Morrison, 74, the widow of company founder Harry Morrison and a director herself until 1990. "You wonder where they were, what they were doing that they didn't know what the hell was going...
Agee partisans suggest that Velma Morrison, angered by Agee's curtailment of her perquisites after her departure from the board, launched a vendetta against him by rallying disaffected members of the corporate community and turning Clark and other directors against the chairman. Clark began heeding the advice of the self-styled "Committee for Excellence," which sent directors an anonymous letter in November complaining about Agee's opulent life-style and accusing him of selling off company assets to inflate corporate profits. Agee would later complain to friends, "Bill Clark made Velma a hero; he provided a forum for my detractors...
...Morrison Knudsen directors scoffed last week at a New York Times report that their ties to a charity run by Mary Cunningham may have caused them to cast a blind eye on problems at the company. One director and the wives of three others sit on the board of the charity, called the Nurturing Network, which helps pregnant young women find alternatives to abortion. "There is absolutely no conflict of interest there," declares Gerard Roche, chairman of the executive-search firm Heidrick & Struggles, who serves on both the corporate and charity boards. "We never pulled our punches. We never...