Witness in Trib lawsuit recants

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A former TCI executive is amending testimony he gave last month in support of the managers of the Salt Lake Tribune in their fight to regain ownership of the newspaper.

John C. Malone, the former chairman of Tele-Communications Inc. and a current board member of AT&T Corp., admitted his Jan. 10 statement was drafted by someone else before he reviewed or signed it.

He said he was asked to submit the affidavit by his friend, John W. Gallivan, the Tribune's publisher emeritus, and returned the testimony to the newspaper's manager Randy Frisch.

AT&T is asking U.S. District Judge Tena Campbell to strike Malone's first affidavit from the record because the managers of the Tribune "obtained (it) without prior notice to AT&T or its counsel," a violation, they claim, of legal rules of professional conduct.

Malone's original statement said that the management and option agreements drawn up at the time the managers of the Tribune — mostly descendants of the Kearns family — sold the newspaper's holding company to TCI were to ensure "family management of the Tribune and the Newspaper Agency Corporation."

The Newspaper Agency Corporation is the company the Tribune owns jointly with the Deseret news to manage both papers' printing, advertising and distribution.

The Kearns family sold the Kearns-Tribune company in 1997 in a tax-free stock swap valued at $731 million.

TCI was later acquired by AT&T, which sold the newspaper to Denver-based MediaNews Group Jan. 2.

The management and option agreements, Malone said in his first statement, prohibited any changes in the joint operating agreement.

But Malone says in his new affidavit that he never participated in the drafting of those agreements and that "on review, I see now that there is no such prohibition in either agreement."

In what seemed a response from Tribune managers to Malone's new statements, the affidavit of Donne F. Fisher, the former chief financial officer of TCI, was entered into the court record Wednesday.

Fisher claims that the option and management agreements were "designed to work in unison to allow the Kearns family uninterrupted management and protection of all the assets related to the operation of the Tribune."