Bankruptcy Information

The long slow death march at Sears Holdings Corporation (NASDAQ: SHLD) is turning into a case study of what not do.  Putting a hedge fund manager in charge of a huge retailer, and then letting the company be run by another person for quite some time without deep retail experience.  Imagine if Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) or Target Corporation began a long secular decline where the only way they could attract investors is by unloading assets here and there, shrinking their geographic footprints time after time, cutting workers endlessly, and by trying to just repurchase enough stock that the free float dwindles.  And imagine no real payments to shareholders in the form of dividends.

Fortunately for investors in retail stocks, Target and Wal-Mart are not Sears. We ju

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Tags: Shld, Shld Wmt

Jan 4 The insolvency administrator of Manroland said on Wednesday it was homing in on an investor for the German printing machine maker and saw a deal feasible by the end of the month.

“We now have parties seriously interested in all three production sites in Augsburg, Offenbach and Plauen, with whom we are involved in ongoing negotiations,” Werner Schneider of law firm Schneider, Geiwitz & Partner said in a statement, without naming any possible buyers.

The firm said no orders had been cancelled and production would continue beyond Jan. 31 based on the current backlog.

Manroland filed for insolvency in late November after its owners Allianz Capital Partners and MAN SE failed to find an investor before the world’s No.3 printing machine maker ran out of money.

Manroland, with 6,600 employees and annual sales of close to 1 billion euros , competes with Heidelberger Druckmaschinen and Koenig & Bauer, as well as Japan’s Komori, Ryobi and Mitsubishi .

Tags: Deal Feasible, Feasible

For Eva Longoria, art imitates life. The “Desperate Housewives” actress spent the past year embroiled in legal drama with investors in her Las Vegas restaurant Beso and will now produce a legal drama for the CW television network.

The one-hour show, called “Vega v. Vega,” will focus on “a brilliant, young, successful lawyer who suddenly finds herself forced to go into a practice with her mother, a pioneering female attorney with whom she has a love/hate relationship,” according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Bankruptcy Beat readers are familiar with the legal drama that’s been the backdrop to Longoria’s daily life over the past year. In January, the Las Vegas restaurant Beso sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection amid a dispute between its investors, including Longoria, who held nearly a third of the company. One of those in

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Tags: Drama, Legal Drama

Unlike red wine, the information you provide a bankruptcy lawyer does not improve with age.

Bankruptcy information is far more like fish:  no longer palatable after it sits for a while.

A bankruptcy filing is a snapshot of the clients situation on the day the case is filed.  From the point when the case is filed,  bankruptcy law looks backward and forward.  The rights of all of the parties are driven by the passage of time.

For instance the statement of financial affairs  looks back at  recent financial history:

• Income year to date
• Income for the past two years
• Payments on old debts in 12 months
• Transfers or gifts in past 24 months

The means test analyzes income for the six months before the month in which the case is filed.  A drop in income may make your bankruptcy filing simpler; a substantial increase may require reconsidering your choice of chapter. Lives are fluid and when months go by between starting work on preparing bankruptcy documents, the changes can have significant consequences.  Bank Read full post…

Tags: Bankruptcy Information, Red Wine, Wine

The markets have a “shoot first and ask questions later” mentality that is not really working too well for Jefferies Group, Inc. (NYSE: JEF) right now.  After the MF Global implosion, investors are looking for the “who could be next” in the soup.  A report out of credit ratings firm Egan-Jones has brought up concerns of it needing capital and that its borrowing costs are high.  It also noted that the leverage was too high at 13-1.   To show how bad this is, Jefferies shares closed at $14.72 on Friday, October 28.  Since the MF Global implosion, shares today are now down to $11.60 after another 5% drop.

What is sad is that Jefferies has denied having a massive exposure to European debt.  The company refuted this: “To be clear, as of August 31, 2011, Jefferies had no meaningful net exposure to European sovereign debt. Recent reports a

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Tags: Jef