The official committee of sex-abuse victims has challenged the Boy Scouts of America over claims that Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico and other valuable assets on the organization’s balance sheet can’t be used to pay settlements to trauma survivors, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. In court papers Friday, lawyers representing those men said that the Boy Scouts are wrongly holding back $667 million in cash, investments and properties from a court-supervised bankruptcy process. The Philmont ranch is the Boy Scouts’ most prized high-adventure camp: 140,000 acres in the Rocky Mountains, the site of revenue-producing activities that have drawn more than one million young men over decades. The Boy Scouts also have said a high-adventure base in Florida and another straddling Minnesota and Canada are unavailable to cover the organization’s liabilities, according to Friday’s court filing. The committee said that nothing in the deeds of the properties would prevent them from being sold to pay creditors, chiefly the men who suffered sexual misconduct at the hands of Boy Scouts volunteers. In a statement, the Boy Scouts said that the adventure camps and other assets it says are out of reach to creditors “are critical to delivering the mission of Scouting.” The committee is asking for a court ruling on how much Boy Scouts land, cash and investments can be held out of reach of creditors as negotiations continue in the largest-ever bankruptcy case driven by claims of sexual abuse.
