Comment by ethbr1

> So, the new owners needed to retain the employees necessary to continue its operations. To do so, they had to honor employee compensation agreements.

At that point, compensation agreements with a previously solvent employer are... negotiable.

There's no "had to" in that scenario.

The government wanted to retain the people who knew how to run the thing. Those people wanted the most money they could get.

The deal could have been whatever the two of them struck -- and the public anger was/is that historically the government hasn't bargained very hard against the leadership of companies in that scenario.