The committee representing Washington Mutual shareholders has managed to do something pretty extraordinary: unite almost every other party in the case against its request for discovery and an extended investigation into WaMu’s collapse, according to court records.
As we reported last week, the committee of shareholders (represented by Susman Godfrey after previous relationships with Venable and Dewey & LeBoeuf apparently didn’t work out) asked Judge Mary Walrath of federal bankruptcy court in Delaware for permission to conduct wide-ranging discovery into WaMu’s collapse. The bank’s estate, represented by Quinn, Emanuel, Urquhart & Sullivan and Weil, Gotshal & Manges, started an identical round of discovery last year in an attempt to see whether it could go after JPMorgan Chase for damages related to WaMu’s demise. The estate argued that JPMorgan sabotaged potential bids for WaMu in late 2008 by leaking confidential WaMu data and spreading rumors about WaMu’s financial condition. The FDIC eventually placed WaMu in a receivership and sold it to JPMorgan for $1.9 billion.
