Quigley tort victims don't want settling parties' plan votes to count toward confirmation requirements

By Caroline Salls

Pittsburgh, May 4 - An informal committee of Quigley Co. Inc.'s tort victims has asked the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York to disallow the votes of some settling parties for the purposes of determining whether the company's plan meets the minimum accepting vote criteria, according to a Friday filing.

The committee said that once the votes are disallowed, Quigley's plan will not satisfy the minimum plan confirmation vote criteria.

The tort victims' group said Quigley parent Pfizer Inc. "has engaged in a long and tortured process to buy enough votes (on the cheap) with the hope that by doing so it will be able to walk away from its responsibilities to thousands of sick and dying victims for mere pennies on the dollar."

"Too financially healthy to make its own bankruptcy filing, Pfizer resurrected a defunct subsidiary to use as the vehicle by which it could obtain a channeling injunction and escape billions of dollars in current and future asbestos liability," the committee said in the motion.

According to the motion, Pfizer's scheme rendered Quigley's proposed plan of reorganization unconfirmable and necessitates disallowance of the votes cast by the settling plaintiffs for purposes of deciding whether the 75%-in-number and two-thirds-in-amount plan confirmation voting requirements have been met.

"Because of the manner in which Pfizer blatantly bought and exercised complete control over the settling plaintiffs' votes in favor of the proposed plan, the court must treat these votes as though they were, in fact, cast by Pfizer itself," the tort victims said in the motion.

Even if the court rules that the votes were cast by the settling parties themselves, the tort victims said it is clear that Pfizer's scheme left them no choice but to vote in favor of the plan because the economic value of the pre-bankruptcy settlement payments far outweighed any value they might receive as creditors under a Quigley plan.

In addition, the committee said the settling parties' votes were not solicited in good faith, and courts have routinely rejected efforts by plan proponents or insiders to buy the claims or votes of other creditors.

Quigley, a unit of Pfizer Inc., filed for bankruptcy on Sept. 3, 2004. Its Chapter 11 case number is 04-15739.

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