Even with all the development of the last 20 years, Brooklyn, the most populous of New York City’s five boroughs, now approaching 2.7 million residents, continues to attract strong interest from developers, each scouring the borough to see where value can be created. Development generates demand as new residents require new retail and amenity services and increasingly new office clusters for entrepreneurs freed from the Manhattan central business districts by technology and preferring to locate closer to where their employees live.
On May 25, at the request of the FTC and the State of Florida, a Southern District of Florida court issued a preliminary injunction order temporarily halting a debt relief operation that bilked millions of dollars from financially strapped consumers.
NNN 400 Capitol Center, LLC, a single asset real estate debtor, has filed a petition for relief under Chapter 11 in the Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. According to the Petition, the Debtor estimates its assets and liabilities to both be between $10MM – $50MM.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently held in Mastan v. Salamon (In re Salamon) that an undersecured creditor with a nonrecourse claim lost the right to assert a deficiency claim under section 1111(b) of the Bankruptcy Code when a senior secured creditor foreclosed on and sold its collateral during the bankruptcy case.
On May 23, 2017, Don A. Beskrone, the chapter 7 trustee for the estate of PennySaver USA Publishing, LLC filed preference actions against 46 defendants. PennySaver was an iconic company that specialized in the production, printing, and dissemination of a free weekly publication, offering coupons and classified ads to targeted audiences.
In a highly anticipated decision—HPIP Gonzales Holdings, LLC v. Sabine Oil & Gas Corp. (In re Sabine Oil & Gas Corp.), 2017 BL 83510 (S.D.N.Y. Mar. 9, 2017)—Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York affirmed 2016 bankruptcy court rulings authorizing chapter 11 debtor Sabine Oil & Gas Corp. ("Sabine") to reject certain gas gathering and handling agreements.
In Weisfelner v. Blavatnik(In re Lyondell Chemical Company), 2017 BL 131876 (Bankr. S.D.N.Y. Apr. 21, 2017), the bankruptcy court presiding over the chapter 11 case of Lyondell Chemical Company ("Lyondell") handed down a long-anticipated opinion in the protracted litigation concerning the failed 2007 merger of Lyondell with Basell AF S.C.A. ("Basell"), a Netherlands-based petrochemical company.
Among the required elements of a claim to avoid a preferential transfer under section 547(b) of the Bankruptcy Code is that, if the creditor-transferee were permitted to retain a pre-bankruptcy payment, it would end up being paid more than it would receive in a hypothetical liquidation of the debtor under chapter 7, assuming the transfer did not occur. This requirement and a defense to preference liability predicated on it—the "Kiwi defense"—were the subject of a ruling handed down by a Delaware bankruptcy court. In Pirinate Consulting Grp., LLC v. C. R. Meyer & Sons Co.
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