Panel hears plan to cap fees in $3.4 billion Cobell settlement

I plan to post part of a recent interview with Dennis Gingold regarding the brief he filed on lawyers fees. Meanwhile, here’s what the media is reporting without any direct quotes from Gingold.

For the full AP story, go here.

By Matt Volz-Associated Press

Attorneys in the government’s $3.4 billion settlement with American Indians over mismanaged royalties are “stonewalling” a congressional panel as they ask a judge to more than double their fees in the case, the committee’s chairman said Tuesday.

Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, is co-sponsoring legislation to cap the attorneys’ fees at $50 million.

He said in a hearing before the House Subcommittee on Indians and Alaska Native Affairs, which he chairs, that “it smells” for the plaintiffs’ lawyers to now make the argument that they deserve $223 million, after the settlement limited their fee request to $99.9 million.

Young said both the plaintiffs’ attorneys and the Obama administration officials who negotiated the settlement refused to testify Tuesday on the proposal and have stymied previous attempts to gather information about how the fees were structured.

“Today, the Plaintiffs are stonewalling the efforts of this Committee to get to the bottom of the fee controversy in their refusal to testify or to respond to numerous written inquiries over the last year seeking information about their fees,” Young said.

If Congress passes the legislation, it will void the settlement, plaintiffs’ spokesman Bill McAllister said Tuesday. Congress had a year to vet the terms of the settlement before it approved the deal in December, he said. Now it’s back under the authority of a federal judge and out of the panel’s hands.

“Political interference in the judicial process would harm 500,000 individual Indians, undermine our system of government and jeopardize the settlement in its entirety,” the plaintiffs’ attorneys said in a statement.

The federal government never would have agreed to a $3.4 billion settlement with American Indians if it knew the plaintiffs’ lawyers would try to more than double their fees, Young said. Even $100 million is too much, he added.

Other subcommittee members echoed the belief that $223 million in fees is too high. But some said the bill by Young and Republican Rep. Doc Hastings, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, to cap the fees could scuttle the settlement and possibly leave hundreds of thousands people without any award at all.

With a court hearing on the issue scheduled for June 20, it would be premature for Congress to vote on the proposal, said ranking subcommittee member Dan Boren, D-Okla.

“The last thing we need to do is unwind decades of work, tons of work, on behalf of individuals,” Boren said.

No action was immediately taken on the bill. Young said he hoped the proposal would give some direction to the U.S. Justice Department as it works through the issue in court.

The settlement ended 15 years of litigation between Native American landowners and the federal government.

The plaintiffs, led by Elouise Cobell of Browning, Mont., claimed the individual accounts of hundreds of thousands of Indians were mismanaged by the government for more than a century, costing them billions of dollars in royalties.

The settlement calls for $1.5 billion to go to individual Indian account holders – a number that will likely end up between 300,000 and 550,000. Another $1.9 billion would be used by the government to buy broken-up Indian lands from individual owners and then turn those lands over to tribes. And an additional $60 million would go to a scholarship fund for Indian students.

AP story on April 5 hearing before House Subcommittee on Indians and Alaska Native Affairs.