Crack Team Hunts 'Zombie' Corporations

August 28, 2065

NEW YORK--A U. S. Treasury Department spokesperson confirmed
Wednesday the existence of an elite team of economists,
financial experts, and government prosecutors dedicated to
hunting down and eliminating zombie corporations. "The threat
posed by zombies is quite real," explains the unidentified
Treasury spokesperson. "Zombie companies have been
terrorizing the Wilshire 5000 for long enough. We've assembled a
dedicated search-and-destroy team. The days of the zombies are
numbered."

Zombie corporations, described by the team spokesperson as
"soulless, capital-eating monsters," arise, for
little-understood reasons, during the bankruptcies of certain
large, complex corporations. Characterized by an absence of
shareholders, directors, and upper-management, zombies
continue to function like real corporations but without
recognizable assets or revenues. "It's a rather bizarre
phenomenon," explains Jurgen Wentz, Chairman of the IRS
Standing Committee on Undead Financial Entities. "Zombies are
completely bankrupt, they have been completely dissolved,
their assets liquidated and distributed, and yet, somehow, they
continue prowling the Street, threatening the living."

Because they lack management and traceable assets, zombies have
proved particularly difficult to track down. "It's quite common
for zombies to have wholly-owned subsidiaries that are real,
living, breathing companies," explains Wentz. "The only way to
ferret out the zombies is to keep tracing ownership as far back as
you can. If it's a zombie, you'll find a vacuum at the top;
everything will just seem to lead nowhere. Nobody will own it;
nobody will be running it. Just nothing. That's a zombie."

Experts differ over explanations for the ability of zombies to
continue functioning after bankruptcy and for their apparently
insatiable appetite for shares in living corporations. "We do
know that zombies prey on firms with depressed market prices,"
opines Wentz. "Exactly how they launch their takeovers without
assets, without management, and without shareholders of their
own remains a mystery. Often the takeover happens and nobody even
knows a zombie has been involved, it's just munch, munch, munch,
the prey is driven into bankruptcy by the zombie and becomes a
zombie itself."

In addition to hostile takeovers, zombies have reportedly
attacked companies with deadly "brain drains", hiring away
upper-management with the promise of millions of options in the
zombie. "Because they have no shareholders to answer to, zombies
can just print as many options as they want," notes Wentz. "No
shareholders, no dilution. No dilution, no problem."

Adam Bendleton, a sales engineer at Introtech, a mid-sized
software and services company, witnessed such an attack first
hand: "It was eerie. I came into work one day and management was
gone, just gone, just a bunch of resignation letters and that was
it. I don't know what's going to happen now."

Citing strategic reasons for keeping the special team's hunting
techniques secret, Treasury spokespeople did confirm
speculation that zombies originate offshore and are rooted in
complex ownership relationships among bankrupt companies,
offshore holding companies, and off-book partnerships and
subsidiaries.

"We don't want to say much more than that at this point," notes an
unidentified member of the zombie-hunting team. "But it is our
belief that all existing zombies were 'made' by a master zombie,
and that if we take out the master we'll take out all the progeny."

Asked about the identity of the mysterious 'master zombie,'
Treasury spokespeople indicated that they were pursuing
multiple leads and had reason to believe that, in life, it had been
a powerful player in the energy sector.

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