'However, there are still many unanswered questions.'
I certainly agree with that, and we are now closing in on three years since CRGP put this all in motion with the announcement of a dividend in June 2015. I don't know if the current court proceedings in St. Louis will provide any clarity or if it will simply be a rehash of the Omaha case and a review of that judge's order. SST and the brokers have submitted their briefs, COR as plaintiff is due with theirs on April 23rd.
DiscoveryStock makes some good points about the continued unknowns - it's difficult to even speculate as to the answers because this case is so unusual.
1. '340 million extra shares after Jun 30, 2015. DTCC debited $4 million from COR and $1 from Alpine to cover that difference. That's the dividend for 454 million extra shares. Where did the 114 million extra shares came from?'
This bothers me. DTCC is exacting, as it should be in its oversight of shares and transactions, and would have simply made an electronic debit of .011 for every share. I don't know how DTCC could have 'erred' in this electronic transaction, despite the very real possibility that DTCC erred in its assignment of the dividend to the shares issued after June 30, 2015.
2. 'Not a phantom when doing payments and talking to COR, but becomes a phantom when required to respond to court, why?'
The easy answer to this is to say that CRGP simply wanted to take the money and run, which presumes that CRGP somehow knew in advance that DTCC would 'err' in its application of the dividend to the late issue shares. That is quite a stretch. The result of turning phantom - the court case could not come to a quick conclusion. Carter wasn't available to reverse the dividend, and the court denied the request to assign a receiver to do the same. So we got a very extended court case, which leads to this point:
3. 'COR already got their money back from their clients -as it should be- and still continues the case against SST and brokers. Aren't they contradicting themselves? If they think the blame is on the broker side, then why get the money from the clients? They even go to arbitration against the clients and won. What do they want to prove or show?'
So the key defendant has its money. The lone plaintiff has its money. The broker defendants were basically pass-through entities who didn't experience any significant gains or losses from the fiasco. Everybody except Beaufort and Nobilis is essentially made whole, and yet the only litigants in this never ending case are those who are made whole. It makes no sense that millions of dollars continues to be thrown into litigation costs FOR YEARS with literally nothing to gain for anybody.
4. 'DTCC paid to E-Trade and instructed them to pay to shareholders. E-Trade argued and resisted to distribute the money for months, why?'
There were 67 brokers with shareholder clients that owned CRGP. DTCC sent the dividend monies to those 67 brokers to simply 'pass on' to those shareholders electronically, a simple process. So 66 brokers did it without issue. But Etrade froze client shareholder dividends for more than 3 months, relenting only at the end of 2015 as potentially complicated tax issues cropped up. All Etrade had to do was electronically receive the money and distribute the money, which it does thousands of times without issue with thousands of companies' dividends and thousands of dividend eligible shareholder customers. Should be automatic, to be sure. Even if Etrade (solely) wanted to take issue with DTCC applying the dividend improperly to the late issue shares, it doesn't change the fact that they received all the money needed for distribution, and that the debited amount was applied to Etrade's clients (Nobiliis, Beaufort) and not Etrade itelf. So there shouldn't be any financial loss/liability on the part of Etrade. Why fight so vociferously?
