Meanwhile, Thornburg’s bankruptcy case—one of the largest in US history—drags on, with more than 700,000 pages of documents produced so far.
On May 27, the parties met for a hearing related to a federal grand jury investigation of former Thornburg Mortgage Chief Executive Officer Larry Goldstone and former Chief Financial Officer Clay Simmons, who stand accused of stealing creditors’ assets to form a new company. The hearing’s outcome was unclear at press time.
The Office of the US Trustee—a Justice Department lawyer overseeing the bankruptcy—had earlier expressed concern that the creditors “may have failed to perform a reasonable investigation” that could have uncovered Simmons and Goldstone’s conspiracy sooner. The creditors—which include giant, bailed-out banks such as JPMorgan Chase—say the trustee’s claim “lacks substantiation.”
Separately, attorneys for Goldstone and Simmons have sought to subpoena the company’s founder, Garrett Thornburg, and its new president, Anne-Drue Miller Anderson.
Other recent papers filed by the creditors note that before bankruptcy, Thornburg and its successor companies “maintained their assets totaled approximately $26 billion, but filed schedules and statements listing assets of $21.9 million” (emphasis theirs).
Certainly, the mortgage-backed securities Thornburg sold have become hard to value since the 2008 financial crisis. But rarely is the size of that deflated economic bubble so starkly illustrated.
