Word: viacom
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...cable industries rapidly consolidating, there's not much room left for a maverick like Malone. Stripped of the enormous leverage his cable empire once gave him, Malone can no longer dictate the terms at the bargaining table. AOL and Comcast are now the gatekeepers, and content players like Disney, Viacom and News Corp. carry much more weight. Malone has effectively acknowledged the corner he's in, indicating that lucrative Liberty stakes in certain closely held assets like CourtTV, E! and QVC will, within a couple of years, probably be sold to whichever media behemoth will pay top dollar...
Plus, demand was as pent up as Peter Parker's web fluid, thanks to a tangled situation that tied up the movie in legal wrangling among various large (MGM, Sony and Viacom) and small entities (B-movie house the Cannon Group) that each laid claim to tiny parts of Spidey. "Spider-Man was plagued by bad deals, litigation and ownership that obviously wasn't capable of pulling off a movie of this magnitude. Thank God, because if they had done a Spider-Man movie in the mid-'80s, it would have been Cheesy-Man," says Arad...
Many of the lawsuits have been justified, aimed at redressing victims' unimaginable suffering. But some have appeared opportunistic, including a recent cluster filed on behalf of healthy plaintiffs against companies that have only peripheral connections to asbestos, among them media giant Viacom, baby-products maker Gerber (a subsidiary of Novartis) and Gallo Winery. If the cascade of litigation continues, according to a recent Tillinghast-Towers Perrin study, its financial toll could reach $200 billion, more than the damage attributed to the Enron debacle. "The liability--both projected and actual--is far in excess of Enron," says David Austern, general counsel...
...beginning to take some particularly odd twists. Consider oil-field-services company Halliburton. Its Dresser Industries subsidiary, which was acquired in 1998, may still face 200,000 lawsuits from a unit, Harbison-Walker, that was spun off in 1992 and that declared bankruptcy on Feb. 14. Then there is Viacom, which, via its purchase of cbs in 2000, inherited Westinghouse Electric's 130,000 lawsuits. When Dow Chemical bought Union Carbide last year, its executives were well aware that they would be inheriting litigation--but didn't expect liability concerns to push its stock down 30%, as they did during...
Certainly nobody predicted the effect the phrase "asbestos liability" has had on the stock prices of Viacom, Halliburton and 3M, which have also taken recent hits. What is more disturbing, however, is that evidence suggests the number of recent claimants who are actually ill is on the decline; in other words, the number of healthy claimants is climbing. "The bulk of these people have no impairment," says Steven Kazan, a lawyer who represents only patients sick with asbestos-related diseases. In 1999, 12% of the Manville Trust's 31,700 claimants were sick with asbestos-related ills. Last year...