The owners of a popular Louisville food truck filed for bankruptcy last week. The Celtic Pig LLC, which operates a food truck by the same name, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection with the U.S. District Court of Western District of Kentucky on Aug. 11, the Louisville Business First reported. chapter 11 protection enables a business to restructure its creditor obligations to keep the business alive and pay back its debts over time. The company's former landlord has repossessed Celtic Pig's food truck, according to an Aug. 1 post on its Facebook page, which linked to a crowdfunding campaign. Derek Steinbrecher, corporate managing director of Ice House Lofts, said his company got a judgment against the Celtic Pig in November (regarding the food truck), but he couldn't provide further details because of ongoing litigation.
Sequencing technology firm Genapsys is considering bankruptcy amid an escalating power struggle between the firm's former CEO and cofounder and his successor, GenomeWeb.com reported. According to court documents obtained by GenomeWeb, Genapsys in May sought and received permission from the Delaware Court of Chancery to hire New York-based financial services firm Lazard "to explore both financing transactions and bankruptcy." This activity appears to be related to a "special finance and risk committee" created by the Genapsys board in March. This revelation comes from proceedings related to one of two lawsuits filed earlier this year by Genapsys Cofounder and former CEO Hesaam Esfandyarpour against the firm and current CEO Jason Myers, among others. Esfandyarpour, still on the Genapsys board, opposed the formation of the committee, just one in a series of actions that have pitted him against the company. In his second suit, filed in April, he demanded more visibility on the special committee's activities. As first reported by Law360, Esfandyarpour alleged that the committee is "acting in secret" and denying him access to information. The defendants, including Myers and other board members, have disputed the allegations that Esfandyarpour has not received information about the company's finances, Court Vice Chancellor Morgan Zurn said during a June 10 hearing, and they have claimed the ex-CEO is "adverse to the company's financing efforts and therefore can be excluded from the committee's work."
Pompano Beach, Fla.-based Stimwave Technologies and its affiliate, Stimwave LLC, filed chapter 11 reorganization to sell their assets, the South Florida Business Journal reported. The companies announced New York-based Kennedy Lewis Management agreed to buy their assets and would also provide up to $40 million in debtor-in-possession financing to support Stimwave during bankruptcy. The companies produce neurostimulation devices that aim to relieve chronic pain. In 2018, Stimwave received a $60 million venture capital investment, the largest in South Florida that year. Both companies filed for chapter 11 in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware on June 15. Stimwave Technologies listed assets between $50 million and $100 million, with liabilities from $10 million to $50 million. The largest unsecured creditor was Palm Harbor-based Oscor Inc., with $616,690 owed over inventory payments.
Revlon Inc. filed for bankruptcy, potentially ending a decades-long bet on the beauty products company by Ronald Perelman, its billionaire controlling shareholder, the Wall Street Journal reported. Mr. Perelman bought Revlon in 1985 and built a reputation for always riding to its rescue when its future looked bleak, often through rescue loans or cash infusions. Now he faces losing control of the cosmetics business as it confronts a heavy debt load, inflation and supply-chain pressures and competitive threats. Revlon filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York on Wednesday. The move to reorganize gives Revlon a chance to shed debt and chart a path forward for the business, which was in talks with certain lenders ahead of the chapter 11 filing. The New York-based company is among the last remaining holdings of Mr. Perelman, a private-equity financier whose deal for Revlon was one of the original high-profile leveraged buyouts. His investment firm, MacAndrews & Forbes Inc., owns roughly 85% of the business, which his daughter Debra Perelman runs as chief executive. Revlon narrowly avoided bankruptcy in 2020 after lockdowns emptied malls, salons and spas nationwide. Sales are now rebounding, but the company also is contending with a debt load of roughly $3.3 billion as of March, according to securities filings. Revlon found itself in a bind for years with too much debt, according to analysts, and lost some of its gloss as consumer habits changed and new competition emerged. The COVID-19 pandemic worsened matters by sapping consumer traffic in key shopping areas.
A San Francisco-based hospitality group with more than a dozen budget hotels around the Bay Area recently filed chapter 11 bankruptcy for three of them, according to filings with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of California, the San Francisco Business Times reported. Golden State Hospitality Group, led by managers Hitesh and Bhavesh Patel, detailed tens of millions in debt in the filings for corporate entities affiliated with hotels in Santa Rosa and Fairfield. The hotel ownership group, headquartered on 33rd Avenue in San Francisco, owns at least 15 hotels across the state from Merced to Elk Grove, including Quality Inn, Super 8 and Holiday Inn franchises around the Bay Area. Bankruptcy filings signed by Hitesh Patel last month for affiliates of a Quality Inn & Suites in Santa Rosa and a La Quinta Inn & Suites in Fairfield indicated assets of more than $10 million and liabilities of more than $10 million and of about $8.3 million, respectively. The most recent petition, filed June 1 for a Holiday Inn Express in Santa Rosa, declared assets of just over $33 million and liabilities of about $30.5 million. The largest claim against the Holiday Inn Express affiliate is from an entity tied to Columbia Pacific Advisors — an investment firm based in Seattle — in the form of a lien entitling it to the deed of trust of the 98-room hotel, valued at $24 million.
Pareteum Corporation and certain affiliates, a global cloud communications-platform-as-a-service company, yesterday filed for chapter 11 protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, according to a company press release. The company intends to execute a strategic asset sale under section 363 of the Code while addressing legacy issues. Prior to the filing of the company's chapter 11 cases, the company's board of directors and management evaluated a wide range of strategic alternatives and implemented a strategic asset sale strategy. After a thorough marketing process to obtain a stalking-horse bidder for a court-supervised sale process and as a result of arm's length negotiations, Circles MVNE Pte. Ltd. has combined with Channel Ventures Group, LLC to execute a stalking horse asset purchase agreement for substantially all of the assets of the company. Circles has agreed to acquire the company's Mobile Virtual Network Enabler business and associated contracts, and CVG has agreed to acquire the Company's Mobile Virtual Network Operator, IDM, iPass, and Small and Medium Business Enterprise businesses and associated contracts. These agreements are subject to higher and better offers, among other conditions, as well as approval from the bankruptcy court.
An Illinois-based trucking company has filed for chapter 11 protection, citing a jury award of $10 million in December after a 2019 fatal truck crash involving one of its drivers, Freight Waves reported. Joseph Keller, president of Marvin Keller Trucking, headquartered in Sullivan, Ill., filed the first of several emergency motions in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of Illinois on Friday, stating the bankruptcy filing is necessary to “avoid irreparable and immediate harm” to the carrier’s operations. In the filing, Keller wrote that the “substantial money judgment” against the trucking company, stemming from the jury verdict is the “main event” for the family-owned trucking company, founded by his father, Marvin Keller in 1965, to file chapter 11. “With an agreed forbearance on collection of the judgment about to expire, and the debtor [MKT] unable to pay the judgment amount, the debtor filed a voluntary petition under chapter 11 to maximize the potential recovery to its creditors and for the benefit of the other parties in interest including its employees,” according to the trucking company’s emergency motion. A hearing on Marvin Keller’s emergency motions is set for Wednesday.
Architecture and design firm EYP Inc filed for bankruptcy on Sunday to sell its assets in the midst of litigation involving former shareholders and employees and after years of attempting to revamp its complicated debt obligations, Reuters reported. The Albany, N.Y.-based company sought chapter 11 protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware with $149 million in debt. EYP has lined up a lead bid from private equity firm Ault Alliance Inc, its senior lender, to buy its assets for $67.7 million. “EYP is a good candidate to use the protections that a Chapter 11 process provides,” interim CEO Kefalari Mason said in a statement. EYP has offices in 11 cities across the U.S. and projects in approximately 100 countries. Its clients include public and private colleges, the federal government and medical centers, among others. The company said that its business remained healthy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mason said in a written declaration that the company’s recent financial trouble stems from complex debt obligations owed to several groups of creditors and lawsuits brought by former employees over EYP’s prior debt transactions and restructuring efforts. One of the lawsuits accused a prior shareholder, Long Point Capital Inc, of duping employees into selling their equity in the company to an employee stock ownership plan in exchange for worthless notes. Though EYP itself is not a defendant in the case, it is on the hook for “significant” indemnification obligations to former directors, who were also defendants in the lawsuit, and Long Point. The company has received millions of dollars in indemnification demands, most of which it has not been able to pay because it needs the money it has to continue business operations, Mason said in the declaration. Additionally, EYP spent years trying to restructure its debt without filing for bankruptcy, to no avail.
GWG Holdings Inc., an alternative asset manager known for selling life-insurance bonds to retail investors, filed for bankruptcy yesterday after accounting issues and the resignation of its auditor prevented it from continuing to sell its products, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Dallas-based GWG created financial instruments called L Bonds, which pooled money from bond investors to purchase life-insurance policies on the secondary market, aiming to use payouts from the policies when people die to repay the investors. The company enters chapter 11 with more than $1.6 billion of L Bonds outstanding, mostly owned by individual investors who bought them after hearing a sales pitch from regional broker-dealers who sold the bonds on GWG’s behalf. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that GWG was preparing to file for bankruptcy amid a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into the company’s financial accounting and its issuance of L Bonds. The SEC probe, which began in 2020, remains ongoing, GWG Chief Financial Officer Timothy Evans said in court papers Wednesday. GWG was forced to stop selling additional L Bonds because of accounting problems that delayed the filing of its 2020 annual report, as well as the resignation of its auditor, leading the company to fail to make interest payments to L Bond holders in January. Many of the investors in the L Bonds are elderly or retired individuals, some of whom invested much of their life savings, according to a number of L Bond holders and broker-dealers who sold them the securities.
Ion Geophysical Corp., which develops seismic-mapping software and digital-imaging technology for offshore oil-drilling companies, has filed for chapter 11 protection with plans to hand control to junior bondholders, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Houston-based Ion said cost-cutting measures that clients implemented during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic have remained in place even as energy markets have recovered, hurting its business. Oil-and-gas clients often view Ion’s exploration services and data offerings as discretionary, spending less when budgets are cut, the company said. Ion said that it has entered into a restructuring-support agreement for bondholders owed roughly $124 million in principal and interest to convert that debt to equity in the reorganized business that emerges from chapter 11, according to court papers filed Tuesday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Houston. While the restructuring proceeds in bankruptcy court, Ion said it would canvass the market and seek higher bids for the potential sale of its assets. The company, which must get bankruptcy-court approval for the sale process, has proposed a June 2 bid deadline, court papers said.
