Pioneer Press Article About Richie Capital

John Welbes has a long article about Thane Richie and the lawsuits:

Led by Thane Ritchie, the firm got stiffed for about $260 million when Petters' Ponzi scheme imploded in 2008.

Later this week, a civil racketeering lawsuit that Ritchie Capital brought against two former Petters executives is scheduled for a hearing in federal court in Chicago.

The Petters executives named in the suit are former Polaroid Corp. CEO Mary Jeffries and Camille Chee-Awai, who was the CEO of Petters Capital. Neither has been charged with any crime. But Ritchie claims that the two were part of a fraud — separate from the Petters Ponzi scheme — that cheated Ritchie out of a secured position in Polaroid, and $260 million.

At the Chicago hearing, Judge John Darrah will be asked to rule on motions from Jeffries and Chee-Awai to dismiss the racketeering suit and, separately, to move it to federal court in Minnesota if he doesn't throw it out.

--snip--

As Tom Petters' criminal trial wrapped up in December, an organization called "Stop the Petters Scam Foundation" started running ads in the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune. The ads laid out a long list of complaints about how the case had been handled by federal authorities. The foundation is supported by Ritchie Capital.

When the Star Tribune cancelled the ad run after nine installments had appeared, the foundation sued the newspaper for breach of contract. The foundation claims the Star Tribune was pressured by persons unknown to stop printing the ads.

The foundation's case is without merit, said Ben Taylor, a spokesman for the Star Tribune. The Star Tribune's own judgment was used in the decision to stop running the ads, he said. The remaining ads appeared in the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

The foundation hasn't backed off that lawsuit, and in the last couple of weeks has subpoenaed a series of prominent Minnesotans. "We're just trying to determine who, if anybody, involved in the Petters case contacted the Star Tribune to get ads dropped," said Phil Villaume, an attorney representing the foundation.

Subpoenas have gone out to U.S. federal district Court Judge Ann Montgomery, who's handling the Tom Petters civil case; former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman; U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar; Doug Kelley; and Deanna Coleman, a Petters executive who led federal investigators to the Ponzi scheme, pleaded guilty to fraud and testified against Petters at his trial.

People close to the case said several of the subjects of the subpoenas would contest being forced to give depositions.

Read the entire article.

I just took a look at the Stop the Petters Scam website. The website looks a little shabby - some of the links are broken. This pop-up has a picture of Judge Ann Montgomery - the caption says "Dean Vlahos" (click on screenshot to make bigger):



Speaking of broken links, there are many links from this blog to the petters-fraud.com website which is no longer online.

Topix Forum Post About Tom Petters

Why does "Petters Attorney Decries 'Rush to Judgment'" have 13,762 comments?

Saint Cloud Times Series on Petters

Begins with article about Doug Kelly.

With a history of finding himself in the middle of some of the most high-profile cases, it’s no surprise Kelley is at ground zero of the Tom Petters fraud case.

His role in it, though, might surprise.

Read the whole thing.

Day Two of the series - The Money Chase: Team hunts globally for Petters' assets.

Petters Sentencing Moved to March 15th

AP via Strib:

ST. PAUL, Minn. - Minnesota businessman Tom Petters' sentencing for orchestrating a $3.65 billion Ponzi scheme has been rescheduled to March 15.

U.S. District Judge Richard Kyle rescheduled the sentencing in an order Friday.

Polaroid Art Collection to be Auctioned Off

The NY Times has the story.

A.D. Coleman comments on the NYT article at Photocritic International.

Vogel gets one substantial fact dead wrong when she writes, “To pay off creditors, a bankruptcy court in Minnesota is forcing Polaroid to sell a portion of its collection at Sotheby’s in New York on June 21 and 22.” The Minnesota Bankruptcy Court is definitely not “forcing Polaroid to sell a portion of its collection at Sotheby’s.” The Minnesota Bankruptcy Court has merely endorsed the debtors’ fervent plea to allow this sale to go forward; it didn’t require it of them. In short, the current holders of the collection initiated this sale, not the court; the fact that this will happen under a ruling known generically as a court order should not get interpreted as the court requiring reluctant parties to conduct a fire sale. In this case, the sellers can’t wait to get rid of the stuff, in which they have no interest outside of its cash value.

It’s also important to point out that the entity selling off the collection is neither the original Polaroid Corporation nor the company now marketing products under the Polaroid brand name. It’s PBE Corporation, formerly known as Polaroid Corporation, a segment of the husk of Petters Group Worldwide, which got dismantled as a result of the collapse of a Ponzi scheme that operated under the name Petters International. (Petters has now been tried and convicted for that crime.) I know this gets arcane, but as journalists we need to exercise great precision in using the name Polaroid to identify a legal entity at this juncture, given that it applies to two now-defunct corporations and can also get construed as referring to the current holders of that brand name. In point of fact, no extant legal entity now goes by the name Polaroid Corporation.

Read the whole thing.

Land of 10,000 Ponzi Schemes

Kare 11 reporter Trisha Volpe asks; Hecker just another Petters?

The charges are about the same. The amount of money at issue in the criminal charges is very different. Petters was convicted in a more than $3 billion dollar ponzi scheme. Hecker is charged with allegedly defrauding lenders and others of several million. If found guilty, Hecker could still go to prison for a very long time.

But will there be audio like this?

Tom Petters Sentencing Scheduled for March 10

AP via ABC News:

Minnesota businessman Tom Petters is scheduled to be sentenced March 10 on his conviction for orchestrating a $3.65 billion Ponzi scheme.