Marble Ridge Capital founder Daniel Kamensky was given the green light to practice law in New York again, barely a year after he was convicted of fraud in trying to acquire Neiman Marcus Group Inc. assets out of bankruptcy, Bloomberg News reported. A New York court on Tuesday granted Kamensky’s application for reinstatement to the bar. His law license was suspended last September, a few months after he was sentenced to six months in prison for bankruptcy fraud. He was released after serving a little more than two months. Kamensky declined to comment. He began his career as a lawyer with Simpson Thacher & Bartlett before moving to Lehman Brothers and then Paulson & Co. He launched Marble Ridge in 2015. He now serves on the advisory board of the Creditor Rights Coalition, a nonprofit group established to protect the rights of creditors and “promote transparency, accountability, and equality of treatment for similarly situated creditors to ensure fair and robust stakeholder participation in bankruptcy proceedings.” Kamensky pleaded guilty in February 2021 to abusing his position as a member of Neiman Marcus’s creditors’ committee to compel Jefferies Financial Group Inc. to abandon a bid for a piece of the insolvent department store chain’s online retail unit. Kamensky’s plan was to have Marble Ridge acquire them instead for less. The bankruptcy judge asked prosecutors to investigate Kamensky’s conduct, and he became perhaps the first distressed-debt investor to be prosecuted for abusing his position on a bankruptcy committee. Marble Ridge shut down and started returning money to investors in August 2020, the month before Kamensky was charged. A day after Kamensky’s arrest, the judge approved a plan that handed ownership to Neiman Marcus creditors in return for forgiving about $4 billion of the chain’s $5.5 billion in debt.
