His mother took the first step Monday when she petitioned the Superior Court of California to be named the administrator of the late singer's estate. Katherine Jackson said in the filing she was acting to ensure Michael Jackson's three children are the beneficiaries.
It's the opening salvo in a complicated battle for a fortune that includes a lucrative music catalog of the King of Pop's own hits, the rights to songs by the Beatles, and the Neverland ranch that could one day be a tourist attraction.
There's even an elaborate video production, dubbed the "Dome Project," that was overseen by Jackson and finished two weeks before he died.
The high stakes and array of people involved will likely make the fight far more convoluted than recent high-profile squabbles over the estates of singer James Brown and ex-Playboy playmate Anna Nicole Smith.
"There's no doubt that there's going to be a big battle," said Alexis Martin Neely, a Los Angeles-based estate attorney. "It's going to be very messy and I don't see anything comparing to this."
Complicating matters is that few, if any, people know all the details of the reclusive entertainer's financial affairs.
His mother's filing, for example, declares that Jackson died "intestate," or without a will. But that is in dispute.
Another person with knowledge of Jackson's business matters told The Associated Press last Friday that there is a will, which would take precedent in court. That person spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the material.
Becoming an estate administrator "puts a vast amount of power in one person's hands," said Roy Kozupsky, a lawyer with Smith, Gambrell & Russell. The person would have the power to sell assets, make deals and determine how to pay off creditors, he said.
At stake is Jackson's 50 percent ownership in Sony/ATV Music Publishing, a company itself estimated to be worth $2 billion; Jackson's own recordings and songwriting rights, which could be worth more than $150 million; and his joint ownership of the Neverland ranch.
Katherine Jackson said in her filing she intends to use the estate's assets for "the exclusive use of the decedent's (Jackson's) three children." But the filing could also be the first move in contesting the validity of a will, if there is one, Kozupsky said.
Jackson, who died Thursday at age 50, left behind three children: son Michael Joseph Jr., known as Prince Michael, 12; daughter Paris Michael Katherine, 11; and son Prince Michael II, 7. The youngest was born to a surrogate mother, while the first two were born to ex-wife Deborah Rowe.
The list of potential parties seeking a piece of Jackson's estate is long, ranging from financial firms to the companies involved in his planned comeback. Among them is AEG Live, the concert promoter that booked Jackson for 50 sold-out performances at London's O2 arena starting next month.
AEG Live reportedly gave Jackson a $20 million advance, which it may seek to recover from the estate. AEG Live declined to comment.
How much AEG can recover will likely depend on the wording of insurance policies it took out and whether they included protection against "medical conditions or another event," said Mary Craig Calkins, a partner at Howrey LLP who handles insurance recovery cases for TV and film productions.
The promoter took out about $18 million in insurance through Lloyd's of London, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment.
A big part of determining what the estate is worth - and how much it owes in taxes - will depend on how much Jackson owed to creditors. Estimates put the tally around $400 million.
The federal government will be able to collect around 45 percent in tax on the value of the estate's assets, minus its debts and administration costs including attorney fees.
It appears that the most valuable assets will likely remain in the estate's control.
The Sony/ATV stake and 100 percent of Mijac, the company that controls Michael Jackson's own music, were held in a trust whose beneficiaries are Jackson's children.
That trust is safe from creditors, said Al Malnik, its former trustee and Jackson's business adviser from 2002 to 2005.
"The assets were protected through the trust against creditors," Malnik said Monday.
Jackson used those assets as collateral to secure $200 million in loans from Bank of America in 2001. He then refinanced several times. Malnik said the loan total reached $275 million by the time he quit as trustee in 2005. Fortress Investment Group LLC, which took control in 2005, sold the loans off entirely "over a year ago," said company spokeswoman Lilly Donohue.
It is unclear who holds the loans now, but one candidate is Colony Capital LLC, a Los Angeles real estate firm owned by billionaire Thomas Barrack, which also set up a joint venture with Jackson to own Neverland, the 2,500-acre (1,000-hectare) property in Santa Barbara County that once included amusement park rides and zoo animals.
Barrack had lunch with Jackson brothers Jackie, Jermaine and Tito on Saturday at Neverland.
Jackson's estate is still growing through record sales and songwriting rights.
So far this year, some 297,000 of his albums have sold in the U.S., and that's not including last week, when sales spiked in the wake of the singer's death.
Jackson's existing works will continue to sell well, said Keith Caulfield, senior charts manager for Billboard magazine.
"He's good for at least a half a million albums a year," Caulfield said.
Songwriting rights also keep earning revenue. Jackson wrote many of the songs he recorded including "Beat It," "Bad," and "Black or White."
For the past three years, Jackson has ranked among the top-earning 100 U.S. songwriters for royalty payments collected by Broadcast Music Inc.
"Michael Jackson is the number one international songwriter in the world for BMI. He is it," BMI chief executive Del Bryant said, adding that use of the singer's songs outside of the U.S. earn more than $1 million dollars annually just for Jackson's share of the royalties.
Warner-Chappell Music, a division of Warner Music Group Corp., is Jackson's music publisher, meaning it promotes use of his songs and lyrics in commercials and TV shows. Jackson's own works, plus scores of song rights he purchased, gross several million dollars per year.
Jackson also owns the master recordings of his own albums such as "Thriller" and "Bad" and had a distribution deal with Sony, according to a person familiar with his finances, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the material.
The surge in interest in his music could inflate the value of assets held by his estate, and the tax bill owed to the U.S. government.
"Unfortunately due to his demise, the value of these entities has increased substantially," Malnik said.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Who gets Michael Jackson's riches?
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Oil spikes above US$70 for first time this year
Oil prices broke through the $70 per-barrel barrier Friday and more forecasters are broadening expectations for an upward swing in crude.
Benchmark crude for July delivery lost 37 cents to settle at $68.44 on the New York Mercantile Exchange, finishing the week with a gain of nearly $2 a barrel.
Earlier in the day oil jumped as high as $70.32 per barrel, the highest since October.
Oil prices have been soaring for months despite a massive surplus of petroleum and natural gas. A large amount of speculative money has flowed into the markets, according to government reports, potentially taking advantage of a weak U.S. currency.
Surging energy prices appear to be outpacing an economic recovery for now, and there are concerns that consumers may pull back spending further, especially with retail gasoline nearing the $3 mark.
"That everyday, in-your-face experience of seeing higher gas prices at the pump; that has quite an impact on people's psyche," said Tom Kloza, publisher and chief oil analyst at Oil Price Information Service.
"There's this feeling of 'here we go again' with what happened last year," Kloza said.
"It hurts discretional spending.
"It leaves people to think about not taking those summer vacations."
This week, Goldman Sachs revised its forecast and predicted that oil would rally to $85 a barrel by the end of the year as the economy stabilizes and OPEC production cuts take hold.
The forecast assumes, however, that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will stick to its cuts - and that has never been a sure bet.
Yet even news that could be perceived as negative on the surface has brought more money into oil markets.
The Labor Department said Friday that employers cut 345,000 jobs in May, the fewest since September.
On Thursday, it said the nation's unemployment rolls fell for the first time in 20 weeks.
Still, the unemployment rate was 9.4 percent in May, the highest level in more than 25 years.
One of the reasons that gasoline costs nearly $1.40 per gallon less than last year are the massive layoffs the have millions fewer people commuting to work.
Signs that major employers such as manufacturers, and consumers are suffering badly continues to arrive in government energy reports.
Industrial and residential natural gas consumption plunged in March, according to an Energy Department report this week.
Storage facilities continue to swell with huge stocks of unused crude and natural gas. Analyst Stephen Schork noted that 14 GM factories will be idled because of the automaker's bankruptcy.
"That is another 450 football fields worth of power and Btu demand that is about to go missing from the market," he said.
In other Nymex trading, gasoline for July delivery fell less than a penny to settle at $1.9546 and heating oil dropped 1.39 cents to settle at $1.7701 a gallon.
Natural gas for July delivery rose 5.8 cents to settle at $3.868 per 1,000 cubic feet.
Rihanna's naked photo scandal costs her Vogue covershoot
Russia says economic crisis is past peak, but not yet over
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Friday that the world has escaped the worst of the global economic crisis but warned that Russia could face a second crisis if it fails to break free of its dependence on oil exports.
Speaking at a packed investment forum in St. Petersburg, Medvedev sought to reassure investors worried about the country's sharp slide into recession.
He said it was too early "to crack open the champagne" but that "nonetheless, I believe we have avoided the worst-case scenario." Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin gave a bleaker assessment, warning of further deterioration in the economic situation.
He said the rising number of unpaid loans would trigger a second wave of the crisis in Russia.
But he shrugged off more systemic problems, saying the crisis would be contained through further recapitalization of banks.
Meanwhile, Medvedev said there would be an inevitable increase in state involvement in some sectors of the economy that have been particularly hurt by the global economy, but promised it would be short-lived.
In recent years, the Russian government has moved to reassert control over areas of the economy deemed most strategic, most notably the energy sector.
Since the crisis began last year, however, the government has bailed out some major conglomerates that were highly leveraged, accepting shares as collateral in exchange for loans. Several mid-sized banks were also rescued by the government last year.
Those moves have worried investors who fear the government ownership will lead to inefficiency and corruption.
"State ownership in most of the sectors of the economy should be viewed as an inevitable but a short-term solution," Medvedev said.
Russia's worst economic downturn in a decade has been driven by tumbling oil prices, a weakening ruble and a flight of capital to safer havens.
Gross domestic product contracted by 9.5 percent in the first quarter after nearly a decade of robust economic growth.
Medvedev conceded the government failed to do enough to diversify the economy away from oil when times were good, and said it was necessary to ramp up efforts to reduce Russia's reliance on energy exports if it is to avoid a more serious crisis in the future.
But investors warned that Russia will find that harder to do when crude prices remain high.
"The more we will suffer from low oil and gas prices, the better we will move toward diversification of the economy," said Andrei Sharonov, managing director of Troika Dialog investment bank.
This "pain" is vital if Russia is "to switch to another kind of wealth," he said.
Oil executives said Friday that if there is not an increase in investment in the oil sector, prices could soar again.
Igor Sechin, Russian deputy prime minister, said oil prices could rise to $150 a barrel within two years in the absence of significant investment in the energy sector.
Nearly 30 percent of the audience polled at the forum said a fair price for oil was between $70 and $80 a barrel.
Medvedev's comments were a departure from previous government statements that the United States, where the sub-prime mortgage collapse sent shock waves through the global financial sector, is primarily at fault for bringing the Russian economy to its knees.
The tone appeared softer toward Washington than at the same forum last year, when Russia still appeared relatively untouched by the global crisis.
The president reiterated Russia's interest in seeing the ruble emerge as a reserve currency regionally and the emergence of Moscow as an international financial center - topics on which the president has touched repeatedly.
Chris Gibson-Smith, chairman of the London Stock Exchange, said Medvedev's speech demonstrated "a gentle assertion of Russia's potentially new position in the new world order."
But those ambitions seemed less attainable after a gradual but deep devaluation of the ruble early this year - the currency is strongly linked to oil prices - and the collapse of Russia's financial markets last autumn.
Ahead of the speech, analysts said they were looking for more concrete commitments by the government to wide-ranging reform even as a rising oil price gives the Kremlin a bit of breathing space.
Russia's stock markets experienced an impressive recovery this year after slumping by some 70 percent in 2008.
But volumes still remain thin compared to last year. The ruble has also recovered much of its losses, prompting some analysts to suggest that the currency is becoming too strong at a time the economy is still under considerable pressure.
"In Russia, we can see tremendous progress ... but that's just half of the truth," said Troika's Sharonov.
