A team of attorneys from Alston & Bird, led by Bill Barron (New York), Bill Boone and Kit Weitnauer (Atlanta), and a team from Ball Janik, from Portland, Oregon, represented MAN AG of Munich, Germany, in an international fraud case that took six weeks to present to a jury and ended with the largest verdict of 2006 in the United States.
MAN, a major German truck manufacturer, retained Alston & Bird to pursue a complicated fraudulent transfer action with counsel in Oregon against Freightliner LLC and its affiliates. MAN is a creditor of Freightliner Ltd., a Canadian subsidiary of Freightliner LLC, by virtue of an underlying lawsuit filed in the UK that resulted in an interim award of £250 million. The lawsuit in Oregon resulted in a jury verdict that asset transfers by the Canadian debtor totaling approximately $1 billion were fraudulent under Oregon’s version of the Uniform Fraudulent Transfer Act and that MAN was entitled to $350 million in punitive damages. Throughout the case we worked very closely with counsel in Oregon, British Columbia, Ontario, the Netherlands, the UK and Germany. Trial in the fraudulent transfer case commenced on November 6, 2006 and the jury rendered its verdict on December 15, 2006. The defendants are all subsidiaries of Daimler Chrysler AG of Stuttgart, Germany.