Re: court hearing
in response to
by
posted on
Feb 08, 2022 02:01PM
Crystallex International Corporation is a Canadian-based gold company with a successful record of developing and operating gold mines in Venezuela and elsewhere in South America
I am not an attorney but this is what I heard:
This was a procedural hearing before Judge Silverstein in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. The matter was to extend the maturity date on the DIP loan. The judge chose to take the matter under advisement. I think she will approve it but there were some side technical issues.
Mr. Adelso Adraianza spoke on behalf of shareholders. For Crystallex, was Matthew Lumn (USA) and Natalie Renner (Canada).
There was a whole lot of technical and detailed back and forth among the attorneys, the judge and Mr. Adrianza. This is a complicated case with thousands( seems like) of motions and judicial opinions the lawyers keep referring to.
I heard the DIP loan principle and interest is $ 170 million at the moment. The company has just under $ 100 million cash on hand and is burning about $ 20 million a year. The company has several hundreds of millions of Venezuelan securities but cannot sell them for dollars because of the Treasury Department ruling. The company is not drawing any additional monies from the DIP lender at this time.
No creditors have been paid yet. In Canada, each creditor payment requires a court order. When the final collections are made, there are 6 creditor groups that will be paid before the Equity Group gets paid ( that's us common shareholders). Once the final collection is made, there is no plan to restructure or reorganize the company...it will just be a complete liquidation.
Natalie Renner said Mr. Adrianza was well aware of the company's cash and activities. He seems a very persistent shareholder ( my opinion). He has other matters that will be forthcoming in this court in the near future. Judge Silverstein said she did not want to rule on anything today because she did not want to inadvertantly prejudice his future matters.
The hearing was about 90 minutes. I did not count the number of attendees but I think it was around 15 people. The judge seemed struggling at times to understand the complexity of the case.
John Regan