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Enron Mail |
PRIVILEGED AND CONFIDENTIAL: ATTORNEY-CLIENT COMMUNICATION, ATTORNEY WORK
PRODUCT Nicole and Bob: I have had some preliminary legal research done on whether Enron Metals has a pre-litigation duty to contest the various allegedly unpaid bills received from the various ICTS-related carriers, in order to preserve its legal defenses if litigation is filed by one or more of those carriers. It does appear that in order to preserve its right to contest these bills in a later legal proceeding, Enron Metals should send a notice in writing to each of the carriers who have sent it unpaid bills, simply stating that Enron Metals contests them. This should be done such that the carrier receives the notice of contest within 180 days after MG Metals has received the unpaid bill. Telefax appears to be a legally sufficient means of communicating this notice. However, this is not the end of the strategy consideration. It also appears from our preliminary legal research that Enron Metals may in fact be secondarily liable for the unpaid bills, even if Enron Metals already paid in full in advance to ICTS, its shipping agent. This may apply even if ICTS mistakenly failed to request sufficient payment from Enron Metals to begin with; i.e, a situation where ICTS thought it could get a carrier to transport a load for $100, and asked for and received $100 in payment from Enron Metals, but had to agree to pay $150 to get the load transported. Last, I believe Bob mentioned that there are in fact unpaid carrier's bills for which Enron Metals has not paid ICTS at all, given the realistic fear that once ICTS has Enron Metals' money, that money may not get repaid to the carrier. In other words, assuming that the bills are in fact factually accurate, were timely billed, and were accurately calculated using the applicable tariff rates (all of which may be important potential defenses that I have not investigated), then Enron Metals may not have any legal defenses, and sending the 180 day notice to the carriers may ultimately do nothing to help Enron Metals if the carrier elects to file some legal action. Worse, if Enron Metals has not already sent out such letters, doing so now may attract attention by these carriers, who otherwise may have back-burnered these claims. On the other hand, sending such letters may (and I repeat, may) deter some of the carriers, if the carriers are aware of substantial problems with their bills. I will have my secretary, Deborah Shahmoradi, call each of you to arrange for a telephone conference for tomorrow or Monday to discuss this. Britt P.S.--Richard, this is just FYI; you don't need to be in on the telephone conference.
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