"This is not a case where company assets were trans-
ferred and all shareholder interests were uniformly
diluted. Pet.20–23. The government took over private
companies, made itself one of the shareholders, and then, years later, took all profit and liquidation distri-
bution rights for itself. Even the lone sentence of Pe-
titioners’ Complaint that the government excerpts
(from ¶2) shows this: What the United States expro-
priated was the Companies’ “net worth”—profits—“to
benefit the government at the expense of the Compa-
nies’ other shareholders.” See also supra 1–2. Petition-
ers were directly injured as a result, and this injury is
independent of any harm that the Companies may
have suffered.
The government ignores Petitioners’ arguments
that the Net Worth Sweep destroyed Petitioners’ prop-
erty interest in their stock and left them with worth-
less paper. Pet.26–27. The government similarly ig-
nores both how Collins confirmed the nature of this
harm to the private shareholders and how it recog-
nized the lack of any clear harm to the Companies.
Pet.24–25. The Companies’ operational assets were
not depleted; rather, their net worth was transferred
to Treasury, the government shareholder, at the direct
expense of Petitioners, whose equity was extinguished.
And to remedy this injury, any recovery must go to
shareholders.
The government also incorrectly claims that the
Net Worth Sweep “provided for the [Companies] to
transfer their quarterly net worth to Treasury in re-
turn for hundreds of billions of dollars in capital.”
BIO.15. This conflates what happened in 2008 with
what happened in 2012 (as the Federal Circuit did,
Pet.11). In 2012, when the government imposed the
Net Worth Sweep, it did not provide the Companies
with any new capital or investment. Rather, the gov-
ernment changed shareholders’ dividend and liquida-
tion rights, taking all for itself. Pet.5–6."
