Valley sushi restaurant Zen 32 is closing its doors. Operators cite a number of reasons for the closing, including the costs associated with a desired remodel.
The trendy asian-fusion grille was a long-time standard in Phoenix, offering up sushi, a grill menu and a popular outdoor patio at the corner of 32nd Street and Camelback Road in the Camelback Corridor.
The sushi-n-sake spot, which had received four stars from online reviewers such as Trip Advisor and others, is expected to close its doors by the end of the month, but will continue to offer its weekday sushi Happy Hour from 4:30 to 6:30 p payday loan lenders.m. Monday through Friday and a reverse happy hour starting at 10 p.m. nightly.
For more: www.zen32.com
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Instead of building 12 million square feet, the developers of the ambitious Miami Worldcenter project in the city’s Park West neighborhood could lose their property to foreclosure.
Even with the cracks in the economy showing in fall 2008, developers Arthur Falcone, Marc Roberts and Nitin Motwani pushed the city to approve the massive commercial, residential, hotel and entertainment project on 25 acres.
Falcone, the head of Boca Raton-based Falcone Group, talked about including gambling if state law was changed.
Although the special zoning district was approved, some critics questioned the timing of the project. The plunge in real estate values has made going forward difficult. No construction has taken place, and the developers have not completed purchasing all of the property required for a contiguous site.
“It was a though call for them in 2008,” said Adam Greenberg, managing director of Miami-based BayBridge Real Estate Group. “They already had a lot invested in the area with land holdings and planning costs.”
Greenberg believes the developers had contracts to purchase additional properties but didn’t execute them.
Fifth Third Bank filed a foreclosure lawsuit on July 28 against the entities that own most of the land planned for Miami Worldcenter: Park West 3, Park West 5, Miami Auction Prop LLC, 950 NE 2nd LLC, 915 N Miami LLC, 701 N Miami and 100 NE 11th LLC. The mortgages to those companies were last renewed in 2007 and 2008 for a combined $39.3 million.
Orion Bank has a pending lawsuit against 13 Parcels, another Falcone- and Roberts-managed entity that owns land planned for Miami Worldcenter. It concerns an $18.3 million mortgage, although the lawsuit does not call for foreclosure. Unlike the Fifth Third complaint, the Orion Bank lawsuit names Falcone and Roberts, who has since filed personal Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
Since Orion Bank failed in 2009, Iberiabank has continued pursuing that claim after assuming its assets.
Falcone did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
The entities targeted by the Fifth Third foreclosure control the following properties:
Miami attorney Alan Grunspan, who represents Fifth Third in the foreclosure lawsuit, did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
“The project is a good possibility in five to seven years, but prices and demand aren’t there for new construction for that long,” Greenberg said.
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After falling into the red in the second quarter and revising its 2009 results to show an even deeper loss, Espirito Santo Bank got some relief in the form of $10 million in capital from its parent company.
Portugal-based Banco Espirito Santo injected $10 million into its Miami-based subsidiary in the second quarter, according to its filing with the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. That boosted its capital ratio to well above regulatory requirements.
It also helped soften the blow of the bank’s recent stumbles.
On June 1, Espirito Santo Bank restated its 2009 results to show a $3.3 million loss. It originally reported a $2.3 million loss for that year. The change came because the bank revised its expense to reserve for future loan losses to $9.2 million, increased from the originally reported expense of $8.2 million.
Sometimes, when banks review the problem loans, they recognize drops in the appraised values of the collateral properties, which causes them to go back and take additional reserves.
In the second quarter, Espirito Santo Bank lost $431,000, but it was still in positive territory for the year because it earned $954,000 in the first quarter.
The bank fell into the red mostly because its expenses to reserve for problem loans grew while it collected less revenue from net interest income.
Espirito Santo Bank made progress in reducing its level of problem loans. As of June 30, the bank had $19 million in noncurrent loans, representing 5.25 percent of its total loans. As of March 31, it had $26.2 million in noncurrent loans, representing 6.87 percent. The bank has restructured many of its loans that were delinquent.
The bank’s $7.3 million reserve for future loan losses covered 38 percent of its noncurrent loans at midyear. The restatement of its 2009 results increased that coverage ratio significantly from where it was originally at year-end.
Espirito Santo Bank was the 21st-largest bank chartered in South Florida as of March 31, with $569 million in assets. By June 30, it had grown to $580 million in assets. Its deposits were up to $480 million from $478 million over that period. However, the bank’s loans dropped to $355 million from $375 million.
Polymer Group Inc. has started a major expansion of its Waynesboro, Va., plant, with the project representing a $65 million investment.
The Charlotte-based nonwovens manufacturer is installing production equipment at the site through a lease agreement provided by a joint venture between GE Capital and ING Capital.
“This expansion continues to build upon PGI’s ability to employ industry-leading technologies, combined with recent proprietary technological development,” says Daniel Guerrero, Polymer Group vice president and general manager of the U.S. region. “The installation of this advanced equipment enables PGI to deliver differentiated products to customers that will achieve enhanced and improved barrier, softness and opacity compared to the current marketplace capabilities for use in such products as diapers, and surgical gowns and drapes.”
The project will add 41 jobs to the Waynesboro operation paydayloans. The expansion is slated for completion in the second half of 2011.
Polymer Group chose the Virginia site for the project earlier this year, selecting it over the company’s Mooresville plant. Incentives may have been the key to the deal. Virginia promised $1.5 million in two grants, as well as job-training assistance for the new employees. The two operations competed for the project for at least six months.
The addition would have nearly doubled the size of the company’s 210,000-square-foot plant in Mooresville Business Park. The facility employs 115 workers.
The company (OTCBB:POLGA) is based in Harris Corners Business Park in north Charlotte. Polymer Group has 14 manufacturing and converting facilities in nine countries.
The Temple University Health System said Friday that its president and CEO, Edmond F. Notebaert, will step down.
In a press release, the North Philadelphia-based health system said Notebaert will continue at Temple during a transition period and help select future leaders for the system. The release did not say exactly when Notebaert will leave Temple, where he arrived in 2008 after working as president and CEO at the University of Maryland Medical System. Before that he was president and CEO at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
"When I accepted this position in September 2008, I came with clear objectives and priorities to stabilize the health system and position it for success moving forward,” Notebaert said cash advance today. “We have made tremendous progress and the time is right to now look towards long-term executive leadership.”
During his tenure, Temple addressed operating deficits and declining reimbursements, and converted struggling Northeastern Hospital from an inpatient facility to an ambulatory care center, among other efforts.
Dr. Ann Weaver Hart, president of Temple University, said, “Ed has many accomplishments during his tenure and raised the expectations of Temple’s health enterprise. I appreciate his commitment to Temple Health, our employees and patients.”
Spirit Airlines and its striking pilots agreed to meet with mediators today, the union said, signaling a potential thaw that would be welcomed by the thousands of customers holding tickets on the grounded airline.
Sean Creed, head of the pilots union at Spirit, said the National Mediation Board has asked both sides to meet in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. However, union officials said the strike would continue until they approve any deal.
Spirit said it wouldn’t fly until Thursday at the earliest, forcing its roughly 16,000 daily passengers to get where they were going by rental car or an expensive walk-up fare on another airline. Spirit carries just 1 percent of the nation’s air traffic, but those travelers have been 100 percent grounded by the pilots’ walkout.
Spirit aircraft have not flown since pilots walked out Saturday in a pay dispute. Just a few days before the strike, the airline was saying it would fly through it. That didn’t happen. It has said it would try to get passengers onto flights on other airlines payday loans for bad credit. Spirit spokeswoman Misty Pinson declined to say Monday how many passengers had gotten seats on other carriers with Spirit’s help.
Spirit has said its last offer would have raised pilots’ pay by 29 percent over five years, although pilots would have to work more to get that money. Pilots have been negotiating for more than three years, and they have said the proposed raise works out to less than 4 percent per year.
Pilots have said their pay should be similar to that of pilots at other discount airlines such as JetBlue Airways and AirTran Airways, a unit of AirTran Holdings Inc. The company has said those airlines are much bigger than Spirit.
Privately held Spirit is based in Miramar, Fla., and ended 2009 with $139.5 million in cash and short-term investments, according to filings with the government.
Austin Community College President and CEO Stephen Kinslow is reportedly retiring after 34 years serving the school.
The Austin-American Statesman reported Tuesday the community college’s top executive stepping down after his contract expires June 2011. Kinslow’s filled the role for six years, previously working as interim chief, assistant dean and in other positions.
Kinslow was originally appointed to the position in 2005 for a two-year term after former president Robert Aguero abruptly left, having served only nine months with the school. ACC’s leaders appointed Kinslow to help the college stabilize before searching for a new president, but instead renewed his contract at the end of the two years.
The college is now beginning a nationwide search for his replacement, possibly hiring a search firm to lead the hiring.
Prior to working in Austin, Kinslow, 60, taught public school in Big Spring, Texas and for the Dallas County Community College District. He earned his doctorate from the University of Texas, his master’s from Southern Methodist University and his bachelor’s from the University of Texas at Arlington.
He currently serves on the board of directors for the Austin and Round Rock Chambers of Commerce, the Leadership Round Rock board, the Texas Association of Community Colleges board of directors, the ACC Center for Public Policy and Political Studies, the E3 Alliance board and as vice chair of the Texas Campus Compact.
The St. Louis public relations community has been buzzing about BP’s response to the deadly Gulf oil spill and how it’s a lesson in what not to do.
“Unfortunately for BP, they have let the crisis manage them; they have not managed the crisis,” said Tim Beecher, a senior vice president and senior partner at Fleishman-Hillard.
Beecher knows a thing or two about crisis communications. After the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska, many companies built crisis response centers and started doing drills for refinery fires and shipping accidents. Beecher helped Amoco with such a plan in Chicago so officials could rehearse and prepare for the worst. “They (BP) need to start asking the federal government and state governments for help and maybe even put out an international appeal, ‘We can’t find our way out of this by ourselves.’ They need to ask for the best and brightest engineers and scientists. They need that kind of brilliance right now to stop the leak and start the cleanup.”
Fueling the fire of BP criticism are the many gaffes BP CEO Tony Hayward has made, PR professionals say.
BP should have immediately recognized the seriousness of the problem instead of downplaying the incident, said Mary Sawyer, director of public relations at the Brighton Agency. “As late as May 18, Hayward insisted the environmental impact of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico would be ‘very, very modest.’”
Sawyer called the remarks “terribly self-centered and completely inappropriate.”
“This disaster killed 11 people, and we can’t even begin to estimate the environmental and economic impact of tragedy,” she said. “He was right to apologize for his remarks, saying they were hurtful and thoughtless.”
But the apology was too little, too late, said Jill Haynes, a spokeswoman for Isle of Capri Casinos and president of the St. Louis Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America.
“At this point, over 40 days after the tragic explosion on an oil rig off the Louisiana coast, (Hayward) has finally taken the step he should have taken weeks ago. He apologized. Unfortunately, that apology fell on deaf ears … To top it off, immediately after he apologized, he added, ‘I want my life back,’ resulting in an outpouring of additional criticism.”
Lauren Kolbe, president and founder of Kolbe Co., described BP’s communications as “relatively cold and lacking compassion.”
“They don’t appear to be communicating confidently or expressing confidence in their plans and actions, which is leaving people uneasy,” she said. “That, coupled with the seemingly slow and ineffective actions being taken to deal with the spill, is making BP appear incompetent, resulting in the loss of the public’s confidence.”
BP recently hired former vice president Dick Cheney’s press secretary to handle media relations but still has a way to go to restore its reputation. New photos of oil-covered animals also aren’t helping the BP’s carefully cultivated “green” image.
PR experts said if they were BP’s spokespeople they would have used social media to more quickly communicate to the public about the disaster.
“BP underestimated the impact of the Internet on spreading news, photo and video,” said Craig Kaminer, president of Twist. “They were quick at dealing with TV and print reporters, but not at dealing with websites, YouTube, live webcam feeds, blogs and social media sites. When Toyota had their problems, they stopped production and focused all attention on the problem.”
Ron O’Connor, principal of O’Connor & Partners, said BP’s first mistake was to commit to a quick and positive outcome. Instead, the company should have stressed the difficulty of the situation and do so in a way that paints a picture that everyone can understand, he said. “What engineers were attempting was similar to blindfolding a four-year-old youngster, then facing that youngster into a 120-mile-an-hour wind and telling him/her to swing a golf club at a whiffle ball in an attempt to make a hole-in-one at a distance of four football fields,” O’Connor said. “Difficult to achieve, especially when the world is watching and the mere presence of a TV camera gives us the incorrect impression that what we're seeing may be just a foot or two underwater.”
The disaster is now much bigger than BP, Kaminer said. “It will impact millions of lives and livelihoods, and potentially wipe out coastal communities for generations. This is not only possibly fatal for BP but it will impact every oil company and their operations.”
Oshkosh Corp.'s defense division said Thursday that it has begun delivering to the U.S. Army the first of its Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles ahead of schedule.
The vehicles being delivered are part of the estimated $3 billion contract that Oshkosh-based Oshkosh Defense retained after a challenge by competing suppliers resulted in a re-evaluation of the award process. The five-year FMTV contract is for the production of an estimated 23,000 vehicles and trailers, as well as for support services and training.
Oshkosh (NYSE: OSK) said the first deliveries, originally slated to begin in October, left the company's Oshkosh campus Wednesday.
Production deliveries under existing orders run through December 2011. To date, Oshkosh has received orders to deliver 5,209 FMTV trucks and trailers.
SAN FRANCISCO — Eleven days after losing his home to foreclosure, Jorge, a Napa construction worker, received an ominous letter in the mail. It said he still owed $78,000 on his home’s second loan.
“I was afraid and felt pressured,” said Jorge, who asked that his name be withheld because he is embarrassed about his situation. “I called them to say I had already lost the house in a foreclosure,” he said, speaking in Spanish through a translator. “They told me it doesn’t matter, you have to pay the money anyway.”
Jorge’s experience is being mirrored elsewhere. Debt collectors are starting to hound people who lost their homes to foreclosures or short sales over their second mortgages.
In California, a foreclosure generally wipes out the borrowers’ obligation on the main mortgage but not necessarily on other home loans.
“We’ve seen a lot of folks coming to us, saying, ‘I was foreclosed on, now these people say I owe $150,000 for my second loan; I thought everything was going to go away, what do I do now?’” said Noah Zinner, an attorney with Housing & Economic Rights Advocates in Oakland.
Some experts think the trend will accelerate, causing foreclosure pain to linger.
“I think the other shoe is going to drop soon,” said Shannon Jones, a real estate attorney in Danville who gets several calls a day from people concerned about their liabilities post-foreclosure. “In the next two years we will see a huge volume of (debt collection on) second loans. We’re seeing a number of lenders start filing suit or turn them over to collection companies.”
California is a nonrecourse state, meaning lenders cannot pursue borrowers for unpaid balances on home-purchase loans. However, home loans not used for the purchase — home equity lines of credit and second loans taken out after purchase — are recourse loans, which means lenders are legally entitled to collect the unpaid balance. Depending on the type of loan, they have four to six years to pursue borrowers, Jones said.
Refinanced mortgages do become recourse loans, but in California a nonjudicial foreclosure — the most common kind — eliminates the borrower’s liability to the lender that carried out the foreclosure, which is generally the main lender. A second lender for a non-purchase loan, however, still has “recourse,” or the right to pursue the borrower.
In Jorge’s case, he took out the second loan to buy his house, so it is nonrecourse debt, and he cannot be sued for the unpaid balance. A debt collector can, however, ask him to pay “voluntarily.”
For several months, Jorge continued to receive letters and phone calls from both his bank and a debt collector asking him to pay.
“The servicer says there is nothing that prohibits the borrower from voluntarily paying us,” Zinner said. “There is no question it’s sneaky, but it’s not illegal for them to do that. If they were to threaten to sue, that would clearly be illegal.”
“I suspect they’re just dealing with volume,” said Maeve Elise Brown, executive director of the Oakland group. “(Debt collectors) buy the debt for 10 cents on the dollar and figure they’ll browbeat a certain percentage of homeowners into paying them, whether the money is lawfully due or not.”
Housing & Economic Rights Advocates has partnered with attorney Will Kennedy of Santa Clara to represent Jorge and plans to pursue a class-action case on behalf of other borrowers with nonrecourse loans whose lenders dunned them for that debt.
“Many people are in Jorge’s situation and don’t realize they’re under no obligation to make any more payments after a foreclosure,” Kennedy said.
But millions of borrowers do have recourse loans that they took out after purchase, which means lenders have a legal right to pursue them for unpaid balances.
In California during the boom real estate years — 2005 to 2007 — homeowners took out 2.88 million home equity lines of credit and 1.18 million non-purchase second loans, according to First American CoreLogic, which tracks loan data. The total was 4 million such recourse loans totaling $485.3 billion.
Some experts think lenders may pick whom to pursue by probing defaulted borrowers’ net worth.
Rick Harper, director of housing at Consumer Credit Counseling Services of San Francisco, which staffs the federal HOPE for Homeowners hot line, said his workers tell borrowers who are considering default that their second loans could make them liable to debt collection.
“Depending on what the holder of that note wants to do, it can make their (the borrowers’) life miserable,” he said. “Most of the (lenders) do an asset test to see if there’s anything there. They can run credit reports, use investigative services, get their hands on the applications they used when they applied for a loan.” Applications for loan modifications and short sales also require disclosure of assets.
At Wells Fargo, Mary Berg, a spokeswoman for the Home Equity Group, said in an e-mail: “On a case-by-case basis, after a review of the borrower’s situation, we do sometimes pursue deficiency balances in states that allow this type of activity. We only pursue deficiency judgments if we determine that the borrower has the ability to repay the entire or a portion of the balance.”
Wells, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase hold the lion’s share of U.S. second liens, according to Inside Mortgage Finance. BofA has $147 billion, Wells $124 billion and Chase $118 billion, it says.
Chase wrote off about $4.6 billion in home equity loans in 2009, and has said it expects to write off up to $5.6 billion of the loans this year.
Chase declined to comment. BofA did not return requests for comment.
Jones, the Danville real estate attorney, said she’s turned down some second-loan clients.
For instance, one Bay Area man had borrowed $52,000 on a home equity line of credit for a home that ended up in foreclosure.
“The lender filed suit against him and he asked me to defend him,” she said. “I said, ‘You don’t have a defense. You borrowed the money, you spent the money. You signed a promissory note and said you would pay it back.’”
Often, such borrowers end up settling with the lender for pennies on the dollar, Jones said. “You can’t get blood from a turnip,” she said.
Margot Saunders, an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center, said bankruptcy may be the best option for some people to wipe out liability for their second loans.
“People with a second mortgage who are facing foreclosure should go to bankruptcy to get rid of the unsecured second-mortgage note,” she said. “They should do it as soon as they’re foreclosed upon, because that’s when they’re at rock-bottom, not when they’ve started to rebuild (their finances).”
Other attorneys said borrowers should try to discharge their second liens before a foreclosure or short sale by offering the lender a percentage of the amount due.
Home Affordable Modification Program, the government’s foreclosure-prevention plan, recently added provisions encouraging lenders to settle or modify second loans. If adopted by lenders, that could help people who lose their homes in the future avoid pursuit by debt collectors, but it won’t do anything for the millions who already lost their homes in recent years.
“It will be hard for people in our state to start over again, if they sometimes lawfully and sometimes unlawfully end up getting pursued for pretty significant-sized debt,” Brown said.
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