The owner of New York’s Flatiron Hotel filed for bankruptcy yesterday with a plan to sell a 50 percent stake in the boutique hotel to an affiliate of Uzi Ben Abraham’s real-estate investment company Premier Equities, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The 62-room hotel’s owner, a company called 1141 Realty Owner LLC, filed for chapter 11 protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York. The hotel is owned — through a series of interlocking companies — by Jagdish Vaswani. The hotel owner filed for bankruptcy after Wilmington Trust, as the trustee for the lenders, said that it had defaulted on a $22.5 million loan. Wilmington Trust had sued Flatiron last year in federal court, claiming the hotel had defaulted on its loan by selling alcohol without a license and misappropriating funds.
