[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 128 (Thursday, October 3, 2002)]
[House]
[Page H7010]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




     PUT AN END TO CORPORATE ABUSE AND HELP EMPLOYEES AND RETIREES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Gekas) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. GEKAS. Mr. Speaker, we have seen a bevy of cases in which 
corporate executives plunder their own business, work with insiders, 
and do dastardly things in their business world. We have seen them use 
every kind of device known to mankind to avoid their responsibilities 
to their debtors, to their employees, to the retirees, to their fellow 
insiders even. And so we have done great things in trying to curb that 
kind of practice.
  Yesterday, I introduced H.R. 5525, which takes another step down the 
road of protecting the employees and the retirees of a given company 
that might have corporate executives going down the wrong paths. My 
bill would simply state that if such a corporate executive should go 
bankrupt or a business like that go bankrupt, that retirees under that 
corporate structure will be protected with respect to their retirement 
so that the bankruptcy would not absolve the retirees benefits that 
would accrue to them if the corporation kept alive.
  And so protecting retirees is one of the aspects of our bankruptcy 
reform bill for corporate executives. The other one would be to make 
sure that employees currently on the payroll are not robbed of their 
potential pay checks by a bankruptcy that absolves or tries to absolve 
the corporate executives from meeting their salary and wage obligations 
to the employees. We allow the bankruptcy courts to take that into 
consideration when such a bankruptcy occurs so that the employees can 
be protected.
  This is a national extension of the work that we have been doing over 
5 years now to reform the bankruptcy laws of our country. Do you 
recognize the fact that the current law which we are trying to change 
and which we are within a quarter of an inch of trying to change that 
the current law under bankruptcy allows one of these corporate 
executives to take millions of dollars, escape to a State that has a 
homestead exemption and then purchase a big mansion in one of these 
places where the full value of that mansion would not be subject to 
creditors or to employees or anybody else?
  We have changed that in our bankruptcy reform bill. And so everyone 
should recognize that one of the good things that comes out of 
bankruptcy reform is further safeguarding against corrupt corporate 
executives and streamlines a system that for so many years really 
required streamlining.

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