Britain, Arthur Andersen Settle DeLorean Case

The British government and auditors for the now-defunct DeLorean Motor Co. have finally closed the book on one of Northern Ireland’s biggest-ever investment disasters. “Both parties have agreed that it is time to bring this complex and protracted litigation to an end,” the government and Arthur Andersen & Co. said in a joint statement 12 years after the government sued Andersen for negligence. Neither side publicly disclosed the terms, but local estimates of the payout that Andersen will make to the government ranged from $31 million to $37 million. The government’s legal bill, for cases pursued on both sides of the Atlantic, was estimated at $25 million. It had sought up to $300 million from Andersen, the accounting arm of Andersen Worldwide. In 1976, the government wooed the maverick American car maker John DeLorean to Northern Ireland, impressed by his promise to create a 2,000-worker plant between deprived Protestant and Catholic sections of southwest Belfast. But his dream of building a sports-car empire proved a nightmare for British taxpayers. The Belfast plant closed after four years in 1982 with the loss of about 1,500 jobs. A year later, the government concluded that it spent $130 million to prop up the venture and that Northern Ireland had suffered incalculable losses because the fiasco would deter other investors. In 1985, it filed suit against DeLorean’s accountants, alleging Andersen should have done more to warn the government that DeLorean was on the road to nowhere.