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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

WeWork Catches Its Breath After Reaching Bankruptcy Agreement with 18 Landlords

After months of impasse, office space retailer WeWork has finally come to a resolution with a group of 18 landlords who have insisted that the company pay the rents to its abandoned leases in full.

As part of the agreement overseen by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge John Sherwood, WeWork’s majority shareholder SoftBank, the Japanese investment company, will redirect up to $682.5 million into new credit facilities to act as a backstop for WeWork’s rent obligations. According to Sherwood’s order, landlords cannot draw from those letters of credit en masse at the end of the month, an option they likely would have taken if WeWork defaulted.

WeWork’s landlords had previously objected to this plan, worrying that debtor-in-possession financing would leave them empty-handed should WeWork’s Chapter 11 restructuring go awry. Attorneys representing the landlord insisted that SoftBank should advance new money as part of the agreement. But earlier in the week, Douglas Rosner, an attorney representing the 18 of those landlords, told Reuters that WeWork and Softbank revised the package to address their concerns.

The group, which includes Beacon Capital Partners LLC, Boston Properties, Nuveen, and other backers, continued to express concerns about how they might stay in control in a volatile situation.

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December 18, 2023 by ATTORNEY

Unclaimed Funds Pose Profit Potential For Bittrex’s Bankruptcy

(MENAFN- CoinXposure) Bittrex, which filed for bankruptcy in May, may still be profitable because consumers are not claiming their funds .

The U.S. Secret Service was a significant patron, with millions in the cryptocurrency exchange.

Most crypto bankruptcies are tales of anguish and loss: Anguished ex-customers of FTX or Celssign up and hope to recover a portion of their holdings one day.

Not so for Bittrex’s U.S. subsidiary, which is having trouble convincing over a million creditors to shut up and accept their money, potentially resulting in a profitable Chapter 11 bankruptcy estate.

Since May, and now that the deadline for filing a claim has passed, just under 36,000 customers have withdrawn approximately $143 million worth of cryptocurrency , the company’s attorney told a Delaware court Wednesday.

After the company’s U.S. and Maltese branches filed for bankruptcy in May, emails were sent to a small portion of its 1.6 million customers, imploring them to withdraw.

“One of the questions we wanted to answer was why our participation rates are so low,” Tomasaid, adding that some customers may have been reluctant to provide the additional personal information required for anti-money laundering checks to claim a relatively modest amount.

They are

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September 21, 2023 by ATTORNEY

Party City to Emerge from Bankruptcy with Most Stores Intact

A bankruptcy judge in the Southern District of Texas has approved Party City’s plan to emerge from bankruptcy, multiple sources report. The plan, which will cancel $1 billion in company debt, will enable Party City to close just a “handful” of its nearly 800 stores and save thousands of jobs, Party City attorney Ken Ziman said at a court hearing in Houston, as reported by Reuters.

Ownership of the company will be turned over to the retailer’s current lenders, but the deal will wipe out individual shareholders. “The math is what the math is,” U.S. Bankruptcy Judge David Jones told a shareholder who spoke up at the hearing per Reuters. “It’s one of those things where there simply is not an alternative.”

Under the plan, $1 billion in pre-petition debt will be converted into equity shares, and Party City will receive a new $562 million loan from its existing lenders. The company also will raise additional cash by selling $75 million in new equity shares.

Party City’s junior creditors, including unpaid trade vendors, will receive $3.5 million in cash plus Party City’s share of a $5.6 billion class action settlement related to credit card payment

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September 9, 2023 by ATTORNEY

FTX bankruptcy will be ‘very expensive’ but there’s a reason: Auditor

Fees charged by the lawyers and the restructuring team working on the bankrupt crypto exchange FTX have topped $200 million in just over seven months, but an independent auditor argues it makes sense, given the mammoth task.

On June 20 the court-appointed fee examiner, Katherine Stadler, filed a 47-page report on the fees charged by the law firms in the roughly three months following FTX’s Nov. 11 bankruptcy and concluded they were not “wholly unreasonable in the moment.”

She remarked on the “largely unregulated financial system” in which FTX operates, adding the case was “remarkable” for the exchange’s “global scope, the complete absence of corporate records, and the non-existence of even the most basic corporate governance.”

Stadler confirmed the team working on FTX had “requested more than $200 million in fees” since its November bankruptcy, adding:

“Notwithstanding the relative scope of the known asset pool, these proceedings appear on

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June 21, 2023 by ATTORNEY
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