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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- Lawyers for the former owners of Utah's largest newspaper asked a federal judge Friday to reopen their case seeking to buy back The Salt Lake Tribune.
The six-year-old case took a detour three years ago into a dispute over the value of the newspaper. That matter has yet to be resolved, but lawyers for the McCarthey family and a former publisher, Dominic Welch, say both cases should proceed in tandem.
The main battle pits Phil McCarthey, chairman of a management group that once controlled the Tribune, against William Dean Singleton, MediaNews chief executive and vice chairman, who outmaneuvered the McCarthey group when he bought the Tribune for $200 million in 2001.
Singleton later offered the paper to the former owners for $355.5 million, a price set by a series of appraisals, but the McCartheys refused, calling the figure inflated. Now they contend the value of the paper -- and its readership -- has declined.
Friday's motion was filed by Albuquerque lawyer Victor R. Marshall, who helped a family wrangle ownership of The Santa Fe New Mexican from Gannett Co. in a decades-old case similar to battle over The Salt Lake Tribune.
"This case -- the main case between the parties -- has been pending for almost six years without making much progress toward an overall resolution, primarily because of the unanticipated need for several appeals," Marshall said in a 7-page motion also signed by Salt Lake City attorney Steven Marsden.
Because the main ownership battle could take several more years to resolve, they asked U.S. District Judge Tena Campbell in Salt Lake City to reopen it while the newspaper's value is determined.
A federal appeals court reversed Campbell two months ago after she ruled the courts had no authority to second-guess appraisals for the newspaper.
The Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Campbell to consider whether the appraisals were lawful, but she removed herself without explanation from the case shortly afterward.
The appraisal case bounced through three other judges who refused to take it, finally landing with U.S. District Judge Paul Cassell. The main case, however, is still assigned to Campbell, whose law clerk refused to say whether she'd keep it.
The McCarthey group's lawyers outlined the "tortuous" history of the litigation in a 21-page brief accompanying their motion. In it, the lawyers accused MediaNews of mismanaging the Tribune.
Singleton declined comment Friday when reached by The Associated Press.
Lawyers for the McCarthey group said that if it got the paper back it wouldn't have to buy the expensive new printing plant Singleton built for the Tribune. They didn't make clear where or how they would print the paper. The group also objected to the move of Tribune newsroom operations to rented offices from a brick high-rise on Main Street.
The lawsuit also seeks damages against AT&T Corp., which sold the paper to MediaNews, and the parent company of the Deseret Morning News, the Tribune's joint operating agreement partner and rival.
As a business partner, the Deseret Morning News exercised its right to veto the McCartheys' purchase of the Tribune after they let the paper go.
The McCarthey family reluctantly parted with the Tribune after other shareholders persuaded them to merge the newspaper with TCI, John Malone's cable-television giant, in a 1997 stock swap.
The merger solved an estate tax problem for the Tribune's biggest shareholders, who watched an early investment in TCI that over four decades multiplied 10,000-fold in value to nearly $500 million. That could have left the families of the bigger shareholders with huge tax bills upon their deaths, possibly forcing a sale of the paper.
Terms of the merger called for TCI to give the McCarthey group the option of buying back the paper after five years.
(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
