Dish Network Inc. shareholders are asking a Nevada judge to exclude the company’s chairman and controlling shareholder, Charlie Ergen, from the bankruptcy court auction of LightSquared Inc., Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Ergen, who privately bought $1 billion in LightSquared debt, has a conflict of interest, and Dish’s $2.22 billion bid for LightSquared’s wireless spectrum should be overseen by an independent committee, lawyers for the shareholders argued at a hearing yesterday. The Jacksonville Police and Fire Pension Fund said in a complaint brought on behalf of the satellite-television provider against the board of directors that Ergen’s private purchase of LightSquared’s debt conflicts with Dish’s strategic interests in the company’s assets, and that a “corporate governance breakdown” at the company had ensued. The pension fund said that Dish had created a two-person special committee to protect it from a “blatant conflict of interest” between the company, which seeks to buy spectrum as part of its business strategy, and Ergen, who “secretly made himself LightSquared’s largest creditor” by buying its debt from around the time of its bankruptcy filing in May 2012.
