MF Global Trustee Giddens Seeks Payment for Work, Expenses

The liquidator of broker-dealer MF Global Inc. asked a judge to set a process for paying him and his firm for work and expenses from Oct. 31.

Trustee James W. Giddens didn’t say in a request filed in court how much he sought for himself and his law firm, Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP. As liquidator of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. (LEHMQ)’s brokerage, Giddens charges $891 an hour, and his team’s “blended” hourly rate is about $488, according to an Aug. 5 filing.

Giddens told U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Martin Glenn he would work on MF Global at a 10 percent discount from his standard rates, as in other bankruptcy cases, and not charge for overtime meals, internal copies and after-hours travel services.

Two Republican lawmakers, Ed Royce and Scott Garrett, cited Giddens’s three-year tenure at Lehman in a Nov. 4 letter to regulators, saying he has proven slow at that job. Kent Jarrell, a Giddens spokesman, declined to comment.

MF Global’s parent listed $39.7 billion in debt and $41 billion in assets in its bankruptcy filing. About $593 million of commodity customer funds are unaccounted for, according to a person with knowledge of regulatory probes into the failure of the firm previously run by Jon Corzine.

The brokerage case is In re MF Global Inc., 11-ap-2790, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).

To contact the reporter on this story: Linda Sandler in New York at lsandler@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: John Pickering at jpickering@bloomberg.net.