Former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, whose real name is Terry G. Bollea, helped to put a stop to Gawker Media LLC founder Nick Denton’s bid to lease his downtown Manhattan loft, the Wall Street Journal reported today. Bollea had taken issue with Denton’s bid to rent the loft for $12,500 a month for at least a year, saying that wouldn’t be enough to cover condominium expenses. A bankruptcy judge on Wednesday sided with Bollea and denied Denton’s request to lease the condominium, which is valued at $4.25 million. In objecting to the Gawker founder’s request, a lawyer for Bollea said in a court filing “it is quite understandable that [Mr. Denton] does not want to sell his former home,” but the Gawker founder hasn’t offered up justification for leasing the property. A monthly rental of $12,500 would leave Denton in the red by $97,000 a year, court papers say. The Gawker founder and his spouse have since relocated to a cheaper apartment, according to court papers.
First National Bank of Omaha will pay more than $35 million in restitution and fines for deceptive marketing practices and illegal billing of add-on products, the Lincoln (Neb.) Journal Star reported today. The bank, the largest in Nebraska with $18.4 billion in assets, agreed to consent orders levied by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which were made public yesterday. The bank will pay a $3 million civil penalty to the OCC, a $4.5 million civil penalty to the CFPB and nearly $27.8 million in restitution to roughly 257,000 customers. The orders stem from First National's use of debt cancellation add-on products and credit-monitoring services between 1997 and 2012. According to the CFPB, First National disguised its sales tactics, failed to make it clear customers were purchasing a product, made it hard to cancel debt cancellation products and billed them for credit protection services they never received.
