The lack of enough creditors owed enough money could end up blocking Bill Gates from using chapter 11 to reacquire two remaining power plants of which he’s already the secured lender and owner, as a consequence of a technical provision in the Bankruptcy Code, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Gates’s Optim Energy LLC, once the owner of three electric power plants, has plenty of debt, but mostly to Gates-owned Cascade Investment LLC, a secured creditor still owed $596.5 million following the sale of one of the three plants. The problem for Gates, co-founder of Microsoft Corp., is that Optim doesn’t have enough creditors, because the main one aside from Cascade is a former coal supplier now owned by an affiliate of Blackstone Energy Partners LP that’s adamantly opposed to the plan.
