Posted on 12/17/2008 11:13:39 AM PST by STARWISE
Developer Daniel Mahru, a former business partner of Antoin Rezko, has filed for personal protection from creditors, saying he has assets of $50,000 or less and debts of more than $10 million.
Mr. Mahru was CEO of Chicago-based Rezmar Corp., a development company he co-owned with Mr. Rezko, between 1989 and 2005.
Mr. Rezko, who was Rezmar’s chairman and a former fundraiser for Gov. Rod Blagojevich, is awaiting sentencing on federal fraud charges.
In a bankruptcy petition filed last week in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Chicago, Mr. Mahru does not list his debts, which the filing says are between $10 million and $50 million.
Mr. Mahru, who now has his own company, blamed Mr. Rezko for his financial troubles, saying Mr. Rezko has not lived up to the terms of a September 2005 buyout of Mr. Mahru’s stake in Rezmar.
“I’m forced into this position because of Mr. Rezko,” said Mr. Mahru, CEO of Chicago-based Radian Development LLC. The bankruptcy filing “is not my first choice, it’s my last choice,” he added.
As part of the buyout agreement, Mr. Rezko agreed to reimburse Mr. Mahru in connection with any Rezmar-related litigation, Mr. Mahru said. Mr. Rezko also agreed to pay a $2-million promissory note, Mr. Mahru said, and make an additional payment, which Mr. Mahru declined to disclose.
One of Mr. Rezko’s lawyers, Joseph Duffy of Chicago law firm Stetler & Duffy Ltd., declined to comment.
Rezmar began as an affordable-housing developer before undertaking larger townhouse and single-family home developments in Chicago.
The firm’s most ambitious project was never built, a massive mixed-use development on a 62-acre site at Roosevelt Road and Clark Street.
There is little love between Messrs. Rezko and Mahru.
In December 2005, after Rezmar’s breakup, Mr. Mahru began cooperating with federal investigators against Mr. Rezko, according to a document filed by Mr. Rezko in one of his two criminal cases. Mr. Mahru ultimately was not called as a witness in Mr. Rezko’s case.
Mr. Mahru declined to comment about the investigation except to say, “I’ve had no discussions with the federal authorities in a very long time.”
Mr. Mahru’s bankruptcy petition comes as he says he faces collection efforts by creditors on several Rezmar ventures, including a 4.4-acre site in Sauganash on the Northwest Side, where nearly four years ago Rezmar planned to build 35 homes.
The plan collapsed, and Wisconsin-based lender M&I Marshall & Isley Bank last year obtained a judgment for about $13 million, property and court records show.
Mr. Mahru said creditors have obtained several other judgments against him in connection with Rezmar projects, which he declined to identify.
In March, National City Bank filed a $1.5-million foreclosure lawsuit on Mr. Mahru’s Glencoe home. Mr. Mahru says the case is in “limbo.”
April 23, 2007
BY TIM NOVAK Staff Reporter/tnovak@suntimes.com
For more than five weeks during the brutal winter of 1997, tenants shivered without heat in a government-subsidized apartment building on Chicago's South Side.
It was just four years after the landlords -- Antoin "Tony'' Rezko and his partner Daniel Mahru -- had rehabbed the 31-unit building in Englewood with a loan from Chicago taxpayers.
Rezko and Mahru couldn't find money to get the heat back on.
But their company, Rezmar Corp., did come up with $1,000 to give to the political campaign fund of Barack Obama, the newly elected state senator whose district included the unheated building.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/353829,CST-NWS-rez23.article
~~DING!
Guess he couldn’t hang in there until 1/20/09 to get a chunk of that TARP money from Obama.
what makes you think he can’t?
The article does not say if it is Ch 7 or Ch 13, or if he has tax liabilities which would force a personal Ch 11 (yes such an animal exists).
Thanks for brightening my day...lol!
It’s not this guy is it?
No, not this one.
The other man is a Billionaire living in London.
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