William Clay Ford Jr., great-grandson of Henry Ford (and better known by his nickname "Bill"), was appointed executive chairman in 1998, and also became chief executive officer of the company in 2001, with the departure of Jacques Nasser, becoming the first member of the Ford family to head the company since the retirement of his uncle, Henry Ford II, in 1982. Ford sold motorsport engineering company Cosworth to Gerald Forsythe and Kevin Kalkhoven in 2004, the start of a decrease in Ford's motorsport involvement. Upon the retirement of president and chief operations officer Jim Padilla in April 2006, Bill Ford assumed his roles as well. Five months later, in September, Ford named Alan Mulally as president and CEO, with Ford continuing as executive chairman. In December 2006, the company raised its borrowing capacity to about $25 billion, placing substantially all corporate assets as collateral.[35] Chairman Bill Ford has stated that "bankruptcy is not an option".[36] Ford and the United Auto Workers, representing approximately 46,000 hourly workers in North America, agreed to a historic contract settlement in November 2007 giving the company a substantial break in terms of its ongoing retiree health care costs and other economic issues. The agreement included the establishment of a company-funded, independently run Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association (VEBA) trust to shift the burden of retiree health care from the company's books, thereby improving its balance sheet. This arrangement took effect on January 1, 2010. As a sign of its currently strong cash position, Ford contributed its entire current liability (estimated at US$5.5 billion as of December 31, 2009) to the VEBA in cash, and also pre-paid US$500 million of its future liabilities to the fund. The agreement also gave hourly workers the job security they were seeking by having the company commit to substantial investments in most of its factories.
Fields, Joined By Ford Chairman Bill Ford And Other Executives For The Company’s Annual Shareholde
The findings of the trial judge with respect to the unwillingness of the directors of Pennroad to enforce its alleged legal rights are sufficient to justify the resort to equity in a stockholder derivative suit.[10] But the fact that the shareholder gets into the litigation through a bill in equity does not change the fact that the right to be enforced is the legal right of the corporation.[11] We have then a situation where equity is resorted to merely as a means of enforcing a legal claim. The description usually given is that this is a situation where the jurisdiction of equity is concurrent. The jurisdiction is concurrent, although equity is resorted to as a means of putting the machinery in motion and although, also, the relief given by an equity court may in a given case be more complete and satisfactory than that afforded through a judgment at law.[12] 2ff7e9595c
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