commercial bank

Chen Family’s Garment District Condo Conversion in Bankruptcy

The saga of a Garment District conversion from factory to fancy condos has a new chapter: Chapter 11, that is.  

The Chen family has put the entity that owns 335 West 35th Street into bankruptcy as it seeks funding to complete the project, records show. It also put a Soho property it used as collateral into bankruptcy.

The family bought 335 West 35th Street, a vacant, 12-story building near Penn Station, for $50 million in 2016, planning to redevelop it. The plan was for condo units, to be sold for a collective $99 million, and space for the family foundation’s TF Chen Cultural Center.

Shanghai Commercial Bank agreed in 2017 to lend the Chens $34 million, consolidating earlier loans and setting a December 2021 maturation date. The first sign of trouble surfaced in 2021, when the developer sued a loan broker it had retained for failing to close on $82 million in new financing from a South Korean firm in 2020.

Interest rates were still low at the time, but the pandemic had brought international travel and capital markets to a virtual standstill.

The construction lender, Shanghai Commercial Bank, refinanced the condo project in November 2020 for $60.6 million. But

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January 18, 2024 by ATTORNEY

FDIC Probes Voyager Digital Over FDIC Claims

Voyager Digital marketed its deposit accounts for crypto purchases as safe, but customers might not be afforded the protection they thought because their assets weren’t insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in the way they thought, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday (July 7).

The report noted that Voyager had marketed the accounts as protected by the FDIC. But that wasn’t entirely the case, and the FDIC is investigating, WSJ reported.

This comes as Voyager’s brokerage and lending services have been caught in a tangle of downward-spiraling crypto prices, and the company has filed for bankruptcy.

Voyager has frozen all activity, including withdrawals on $350 million in customer deposits stored at the New York-based Metropolitan Commercial Bank. Voyager said customers would be able to access those funds from the bank after the completion of a “reconciliation and fraud prevention process.”

There’s currently no timeline on when that will happen. But the report said that the funds are likely to be paid in full. This is not necessarily true for Voyager’s crypto assets.

Voyager advertised that deposits in Metropolitan Commercial Bank were insured by the FDIC. But the FDIC insures accounts only in the case of a failure of

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July 12, 2022 by INSURANCE
April 2024
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