Sears Holdings Corp. and its creditors can sue billionaire Edward Lampert and his hedge fund ESL Investments Inc. over a series of deals carried out under his leadership that creditors say stripped the best assets out of the company and contributed to its demise, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Sears’s deal to sell most of its assets to ESL Investments, reached on Wednesday, makes room for lawsuits over various prebankruptcy deals, including the spinoff of the Lands’ End clothing business and of some of Sears’s most valuable real estate into a new company called Seritage Growth Properties , according to documents filed by the hedge fund on Friday. Sears reached the sale deal in a multiday auction that concluded on Wednesday, with the company saying Thursday ESL’s $5.2 billion offer to retain control of Sears and keep about 400 stores open was declared the winner. The alternative was a liquidation of the entire chain. At a hearing on Friday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in White Plains, N.Y., Judge Robert Drain said that the terms of Sears’s deal include “aspects of the transaction that preserve claims against ESL.”
