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Enron Mail |
I will look closely at the sample letters to see whether there is any way to
avoid the conclusion you have reached, which appears to be the correct one. I have a meeting right now, and will focus on it right after that -- I'll send another email once I've completed that review early this afternoon. Michelle Hoyt Thomas@ENRON 07/28/2000 11:23 AM To: Michelle Cash/HOU/ECT@ECT cc: Jon Chapman/LON/ECT@ECT, David Oxley/HOU/ECT@ECT Subject: Confidential Michelle, Melissa Laing and I talked to Jon Chapman today, and basically Jon deferred to you, since the RW employees in NY are a question for US employment law. Melissa and I do believe that the RW US-based employees that were given UK-style employment letters, such as the sample one I gave you, are our employees, because of those letters; they were given "offer letters" by MG before the MG/Enron deal went unconditional and in most cases they accepted them, so they were MG employees when all MG employees became our employees. If it is a fact that they are Enron employees, we have to figure out the liability associated with terminating them! It appears that on Monday, MG and Enron leadership will decide to exit some of the London and New York RW business that MG acquired, and some (minimum 9, max 15) of the former RW employees will need to be terminated during August. John Sheriff and Gary Hickerson both want to know the cost of that decision. Right now we are assuming that we are liable for the severance periods stated in the offer letters to the people; we would like to be able to avoid that cost (estimated at $700k and $1.5M, depending on who is redundant) or reduce it if possible. However, if it is your recommendation that we have to honor those letters, so be it. If you have any questions, please call Melissa Laing (tie line 8303 6617) in the UK and she can find me. Thanks. Hoyt Michelle Cash@ECT 07/28/2000 10:10 AM To: Hoyt Thomas/NA/Enron@ENRON cc: Subject: Re: RW Hoyt, I am convinced that the MG employees are ours. The RW employees may or may not be ours. It is my understanding that we own the assets of RW, and that we decided to hire certain, key personnel from RW. The remaining RW employees do not automatically come with the assets. I am working on obtaining more information on the RW side of things from lawyers here in the US. Key to employment decisions will be provisions of the asset purchase agreement, if any are applicable. You might check with Jon Chapman in the UK to see whether he has any more information on this point. Thanks. Michelle Hoyt Thomas@ENRON 07/28/2000 04:12 AM To: Michelle Cash/HOU/ECT@ECT cc: Subject: RW Justin Boyd said he talked to you, are you convinced that the MG and RW employees are now ours? Assuming that you do: I will bring copies of all the offer letters MG wrote to RW employees, I think there are something like 27 or 28. They are all very similar to the one or two that I have already given you. I believe that we will not want to keep some of the businesses that are being acquired with Rudolph Wolff, particularly the FX business in New York. Naturally, some of the people in the potentially discontinued business received the onerous letters. Gary Hickerson has to decide what he is going to do with this by August 18, if not sooner. With the letters that were delivered , I would like to get an opinion from you on what we have to do to terminate the people associated with the business, assuming that Gary wants to shut it down. Also, MG have 4 to 6 employees in Montreal. We (HR) are trying to convince the business side that we do not want any people in Montreal because of the employment laws . . . but it does not appear that we will succeed. We may reduce the size of the office, though, and we may not want to put them on the Canadian payroll, particularly is we only keep 1-2 people there. Do you have contacts in Montreal that can advise us on how to terminate any employees that we choose to terminate? What would be the Enron position on having them on a separate payroll from Enron Canada? Thanks Hoyt
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