In our June 4, 2009 Client Update, we reported on the jury verdict the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") obtained against Charles Conaway, the former CEO of Kmart Corp for misleading investors about inventory and liquidity levels as the company was approaching its January 2002 Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing.
On December 17, 2010, in In re Settlement Facility Dow Corning Trust (6th Cir., Case Nos. 09-1827/1830, Dec.
The Bankruptcy Appellate Panel for the Sixth Circuit (BAP) recently held that a mortgagee that held a collateral assignment of rents on property in which the debtor had no equity was not adequately protected by cash collateral orders entered by the bankruptcy court that granted the lender a "replacement lien" on post-petition rents.
The Bankruptcy Appellate Panel for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals1 recently issued an opinion of importance in bankruptcy cases involving commercial real estate as the debtor’s only asset, such as a shopping center or office building.
The ability of a single asset real estate debtor in a bankruptcy case to utilize a non-consenting secured creditor's cash collateral has been limited by a recent decision from the Bankruptcy Appellate Panel of the Sixth Circuit in In re Buttermilk Towne Center, LLC, 2010 FED App. 0010P (B.A.P. 6th Cir. 2010).
In Hardesty v. CitiFinancial, Inc.,1 the Sixth Circuit affirmed the bankruptcy court’s denial of the trustee’s request to avoid the debtors’ mortgages with the creditor based on allegedly defective certificates of acknowledgement in the mortgage documents under Ohio law.
Reversing the bankruptcy court, a Sixth Circuit Bankruptcy Appellate Panel held that a debtor in a single asset real estate case did not provide adequate protection to a creditor by providing replacement liens in the rents where there was no equity cushion.4 The notion that granting the lender a lien on future rents to replace the expenditure of prior months' rents was rejected. Accordingly, the appellate panel held that the debtor could not use rents collected post-petition to pay ordinary administrative expenses, such as fees of its professionals.
Upon the filing of a bankruptcy petition, an automatic stay goes into effect which provides a debtor with immediate protection from collection efforts by creditors. But the automatic stay is not without limitations.
“How was I supposed to know that something wasn’t right here … Show me how you want it to be. Tell me baby ‘cause I need to know now…” – Britney Spears
As Ursula the Sea Witch once said “Life’s full of tough choices, isn’t it?” The Sixth Circuit was recently faced with its own “tough choice” on choice of law in Sutherland v. DCC Litigation Facility, Inc., No. 13-1497 (6th Cir. Feb.