Circuit City may have collapsed in an entirely different way, had Tom Petters followed through on a plan to buy the retailer.
The disgraced businessman and former owner of Polaroid discussed purchasing the now-defunct chain with colleagues, according to testimony in Petters' fraud trial.
According to the Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal, a former employee of Petters testified in court this week that Petters told her he had a plan to make further fraud unnecessary, which included buying Circuit City and ValueVision Media, Inc. Tape recordings to that effect were played before the jury, the journal said.
The deal never happened and Circuit City ended up collapsing independently of Petters, closing its last stores early this year.
Petters stands accused of running a Ponzi scheme, which consisted in part of taking loans from investors for the purposes of purchasing electronics equipment to sell to major retailers. Those transactions, though, never took place, and were backed with falsified invoices and checks.
Petters claims that others within his company were actually responsible for the fraud.
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