A two-page letter from two airlines to the U.S. government, offering to settle an antitrust legal battle over their looming merger, may go down in history as the single most effective document amid the tens of thousands involved in the case.
The letter was penned reluctantly by Gary Kennedy, the general counsel of American Airlines, and Steve Johnson, general counsel of US Airways, according to Mark Curriden in the Dallas News, and sent two years into proceedings over a $16 billion merger in an antitrust challenge by the U.S. Department of Justice. “The letter, which almost wasn’t written and that some airline executives initially didn’t want sent, caused some lawyers in the federal government to rethink their case and, for the first time, consider a possible settlement,” Curriden writes.
The DOJ and six state attorneys general had fought adamantly against the merger, which would give the combined airlines 69 percent of the gates in Washington, D.C.’s Reagan National Airport, according to Curriden. At first, the airlines gave a peace offering of 30 slots, but the DOJ balked.
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