Chief Bankruptcy Judge Laurel M. Isicoff in the Southern District of Florida has settled a long-running dispute over who really owned a string of defendant companies, siding with the trustee, who can now recover more than $600 million in assets and interest in a bankruptcy case, Law.com reported. The debtor, Leonidas Ortega Trujillo, a Miami businessman from a wealthy Ecuadorian family, filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy in June 2015. But since 1996, he had been in litigation with the Ecuadorian government, represented by K&L Gates, over the failure of what once was the country’s fourth-largest bank, run by the family. After a 10-week trial, Judge Isicoff found that although Trujillo wasn’t the named owner of the corporate defendants, he was the one who controlled and benefited from them. That means the debtor will no longer get the bankruptcy discharge he had been granted in 2017. Kozyak, Tropin & Throckmorton partner Corali Lopez-Castro, attorney for the trustee, alleged that Trujillo had only filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy protection to shake off a judgment against him in the government’s lawsuit, which was litigated in the Bahamas.
