The reorganization will reduce the ownership stake held by the Sorensen family and ends a years-long search for a solution to the heavy debt load Select Staffing took on at the height of the credit bubble.
The Select Staffing Family of Companies, the Santa Barbara-based staffing services giant, filed a pre-packaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy on April 1 listing between $50 million and $100 million in debts and $100 million to $500 million in assets.
Richard Sanford, free of a crushing debt burden, says he is excited about the future of Alma Rosa Winery and Vineyards and his role there, even though he has lost ownership.
Montecito hotel magnate Pat Nesbitt could lose as many as half of his Embassy Suites properties under a recently approved bankruptcy reorganization plan.
Nesbitt and his company, Windsor Capital Group, parked a portfolio of eight Embassy Suites hotels in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, listing more than $100 million in debts, after being unable to work out a deal with his servicer, New York-based Torchlight Investors. Nesbitt’s Embassy Suites properties in Lompoc and San Luis Obispo were not involved in the case.
Court documents filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Santa Barbara indicate the eight hotels in the bankruptcy are now slated to go to the auction block.
David Prenatt, the Montecito real estate investor who took in $18 million from more than a dozen people and then used the cash to support what a bankruptcy trustee called “lavish spending habits,” is headed for a sentencing in federal criminal court on Dec. 9.
Prenatt struck a deal with federal prosecutors this summer and pleaded guilty to giving false loan application information to Lompoc-based CoastHills Federal Credit Union. Prenatt’s creditors forced him into an involuntary bankruptcy proceeding in 2009. Earlier this fall, his former wife Maria Prenatt filed for personal bankruptcy claiming $27.1 million in debts.
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