It's hard to know what to think other than that Hostess Brands is using its liquidation to try to get into the Wikipedia entries on vulture capitalism, income inequality and class war. The company is putting around 18,000 workers out of work, but wants to hand out
bonuses to top management.
Hostess officials “have not demonstrated that the insider bonuses are permissible,” [U.S. Trustee Tracy Hope] Davis wrote in a court filing.
In seeking court permission for its demise, Hostess said it wants to pay as much as $1.75 million in incentive bonuses to 19 senior managers during the liquidation.
Incentive bonuses? Incentive for what—finding another company to mismanage and trash and kill jobs?
Oh, but weep for the poor Hostess management. It's going to be so very difficult to carry out the process of shutting down the company they worked so diligently to ruin, "not a simple matter of turning off the lights and shutting the doors."
The private equity groups and hedge funds that have chunks of Hostess have gotten just what they wanted: the opportunity to dismantle the company and sell off its valuable brands without worrying about pesky costs like the pensions workers bargained for and worked for and planned their retirements around. And if the government doesn't stand in their way, the executives who managed to make it messy and brutal even by vulture capitalism standards will walk away with nice fat bonuses.