Boston-based athletic gear retailer City Sports Inc. filed for chapter 11 protection yesterday in order to liquidate at least a quarter of its stores, the Wall Street Journal reported today. City Sports said that it has a deal with liquidators Tiger Capital Group to hold going-out-of-business sales at eight of the company’s 26 stores, which are scattered throughout the Northeast from Massachusetts to Washington, D.C. For the remaining 18 stores, City Sports is working to locate a buyer during its bankruptcy case that would either continue operating the stores or liquidate them, the company said in court documents.
Less than one year after Milwaukee entrepreneur Bobby Kraft led a group that bought World Marketing Inc. from Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., World Marketing’s operating companies have filed for chapter 11 reorganization and idled about 400 employees, the Milwaukee Business Journal reported yesterday. Three World Marketing limited liability companies on Monday filed separate chapter 11 petitions in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Chicago. In a related matter, the chapter 11 filings scuttle plans for a Milwaukee investment group that was described in August as “an affiliate of World Marketing Inc.” to buy Bobby Kraft’s First Edge Solutions out of receivership, said First Edge and World Marketing spokesman Josh Morby.
American Apparel Inc. filed for bankruptcy protection after posting years of losses as the clothing retailer, which fired controversial founder Dov Charney last year, seeks to reorganize debts that have ballooned to levels exceeding its assets, Bloomberg News reported today. As part of a pre-packaged chapter 11 restructuring, more than $200 million of bonds will be exchanged for stock in the reorganized company and the clothing retailer will have access to financing after its restructuring, American Apparel said in a statement. Business will continue throughout the reorganization, which was supported by 95 percent of secured lenders and may last about six months, it said. Though American Apparel has been in disarray since Charney was suspended and then fired as chief executive officer last December for alleged misconduct — claims he says are baseless — American Apparel’s financial woes stretch back longer. The chain has posted losses every year since since 2010.
Miller Energy Resources Inc., a Texas-based oil and gas driller that operates in Alaska, filed for bankruptcy protection on Thursday with a plan to hand control of the company to an affiliate of private-equity firm Apollo Global Management LLC and hedge fund Highbridge Capital Management LLC, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday. Miller Energy filed for chapter 11 protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Anchorage and has a deal in place with junior lenders Apollo Investment Corp., part of private-equity giant Apollo, and Highbridge, the investment management arm of JPMorgan Chase & Co. Like a number of other independent oil-company executives who have been forced to put their companies into bankruptcy in recent month, Miller Chief Executive Carl Giesler blamed his company’s financial woes in part on plummeting oil prices. The price of global benchmark Brent crude fell to less than $45 a barrel this summer from more than $100 a barrel a year ago. Miller Energy, a former Tennessee company that shifted its oil and gas drilling to Alaska in recent years, has also been beset by other problems. The Securities and Exchange Commission has accused the company of accounting fraud and in August, a group of companies that said they were owed millions from Miller’s Alaska subsidiary moved to push the unit into bankruptcy. Read more. (Subscription required.)
The company that designs watches for Kenneth Cole, Tommy Bahama, Ted Baker and others has filed for bankruptcy with plans to sell itself to the highest bidder at a court-supervised auction, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported today. Geneva Watch Group filed for chapter 11 protection at the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan Wednesday. The company has already lined up a $15 million lead bid for its assets from an affiliate of China's Time Watch Investments Ltd., according to Jeffrey Gregg, Geneva's chief restructuring officer. In court papers filed on Thursday, Geneva asked Judge Martin Glenn to sign off on an $18.5 million bankruptcy financing package from lenders led by Wells Fargo, which is intended to fund its operations while in chapter 11.
Lincoln Paper and Tissue has filed for chapter 11 protection and intends to seek a buyer, the Associated Press reported yesterday. President and CEO Keith Van Scotter said on Monday that the company has financing in place to continue operations while it seeks bids for the Maine paper and tissue-making mill. He said that he anticipates an auction within 45 days. The mill furloughed 200 workers on the paper-making side of the plant after a boiler explosion in November 2013. The company still has about 170 workers making tissue paper. Van Scotter said the goal is to find a buyer who'll keep the operations going. The company said in court papers that it owes more than $10 million to more than 200 creditors.
Quirky, the New York-based developer of crowd-sourced inventions and parent company of the Wink smart home platform, is filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy to restructure its debts, CNET.com reported yesterday. The news comes seven weeks after the departure of Quirky founder and CEO Ben Kaufman, who stepped down from his role at the head of the company at the start of August. Kaufman's exit followed a tumultuous year that included financial difficulties, key product flops, and a botched security update for the Wink Hub, the control device at the center of Wink's smart home platform. Kaufman was replaced with Quirky Chief Financial Officer Ed Kremer. Originally launched in 2009, Quirky made a name for itself by developing product ideas from an open pool of independent and amateur inventors, rewarding the community with profit shares.
The natural gas drilling industry's HII Technologies Inc. filed for bankruptcy protection after closing down its Houston operations, which handled the watery solution used in hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas trapped in rocks below the earth's surface, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported today. Officials who put HII Technologies into chapter 11 protection on Friday said that they plan to look for buyers for its equipment, which helped extract oil and natural gas in Texas, Oklahoma, Ohio and West Virginia. Potential buyers could also recapitalize the company in a way that "preserve[s] the public status of the company and its tax losses," according to court papers filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Victoria, Texas.
Oil and gas driller Samson Resources Corp. filed for bankruptcy yesterday undone by a collapse in energy prices and billions in debt that KKR & Co. and other investors piled on to fund a 2011 takeover, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Tulsa, Okla.-based Samson and its owners were stung by the price drop that put money into the pockets of consumers through lower gasoline and heating costs, while driving other producers, such as Sabine Oil & Gas Corp. and Quicksilver Resources Inc., into chapter 11. Samson’s filing is among the biggest energy bankruptcies in the U.S. this year, but it probably won’t be the last. The shale-oil driller is, in a way, a victim of its own success. Samson and other producers have rushed to use hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling to tap previously hard-to-reach oil and gas deposits in shale formations, triggering a production boom that helped send prices tumbling. Samson has said it will use the chapter 11 process to try to shrink its $4.2 billion debt load. Read more.
The owner of a mothballed refinery on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands filed for chapter 11 yesterday as part of a plan to sell its assets for $184 million to an affiliate of Boston private-equity firm ArcLight Capital Partners LLC, Dow Jones Newswires reported yesterday. The refinery, known as Hovensa LLC, is a joint venture formed by Hess Corp. and Petróleos de Venezuela, the national oil company of Venezuela. It had warned of the bankruptcy on Monday, the same day half-owner Hess was sued over the shuttering of the refinery. The company said then that the sale and bankruptcy filing would allow the refinery to reopen "under the ownership of a proven and well-capitalized operator."
