Terra firma v Citigroup

Terra Firma is a huge company that owns EMI and recently it has been in financial difficulty due to Citigroup. Citigroup is a major American financial services company based in New York. EMI is totally owned by Terra Frima so because of the financial difficulty it has been in recently EMI has been greatly affected. Terra Firma has owned EMI since 2007 and bought it for a staggering £4.2 billion! The dispute over the two companies started in 2007 and it is about the fact that Citigroups David Wormsley mislead his client into believing that there was another bidder for the record company. The client that was mislead is called Guy Hands and has now began to realise that buying EMI was a 'mistake'. This week David Wormsley has been in the witness box defending himself about not tricking Terra Firma in to buying EMI. Mr Wormsley said that, 'While EMI and Terra Firma were both clients of Citigroup, bosses at the music company had brought in another City company to advise on the sale.' This means that he is defending himself by saying that the other 'City company' advised on the sale of the company and not himself which is what he is being accused of. Mr Wormsley did go on to defend himself, he said, 'My role, therefore, was to arrange the multi-billion pound loan that enabled Terra Firma to go through with the transaction, rather than directly advising the takeover deal itself.'
The 'mistake' was realised quite quickly, so quickly in fact that by Autumn 2007 they confounded in the Citigroups 'legal man', Ted Wells' because the company Terra Firma had just bought was in a much worse state than they had ever expected it to be. Guy Hands, the 'top man' at Terra Firma, started to put pressure on Citigroup to lessen the loan as the loan was just too much for him to pay back due to the state of EMI that he had not realised to begin with. As David Wormsley and Guy Hands used to be good friends because of the loan their relationship has turned sour. In 2007 when the transaction had gone through and Hands owned EMI and things started to go wrong, Mr Wormsley sent his colleges an Email that was shown in court, it says,' Expect fireworks from Guy in the coming week, the truth is we funded a poor business too aggressively.'
Of course, Citigroup is trying to make it look like Hands is trying to find someone to blame for his bad decision to buy EMI in 2007.
The case continues...