A Charlotte real-estate development company that has recently emerged from bankruptcy protection says in a lawsuit that its former owner, Duke Energy, brought the company to financial ruin.
Our sister paper, The Charlotte Observer, reports that a trust representing creditors of Crescent Resources is seeking nearly $1.2 billion from Duke. The creditors say Duke put Crescent into insolvency by making the company borrow $1.5 billion in 2006 at a time that Crescent was forecasting a 35-percent decline in real-estate sales.
The lawsuit by Crescent's creditors, mostly banks, alleges that more than 1,000 creditors "were the victims of Duke’s greed and its improper, ill-conceived and grossly over-leveraged distribution scheme.”
Duke Energy denies the allegations and says it will vigorously defend itself. For more details on the suit, click here.
Charlotte-based Duke is the state's biggest electric utility with 1.8 million customers in the state, including more than 160,000 in Durham, Chapel Hill and other parts of the Triangle.
John Murawski has been a full-time newspaper reporter since 1991, with stints at Legal Times and The Chronicle of Philanthropy (both in Washington, DC), The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Palm Beach Post (in South Florida) before arriving at the N&O in December 2004. At the N&O he covers energy (nuclear, coal, renewable, efficiency), hydralic fracturing (or "fracking"), public utilities (both electric and natural gas) and health care. His beat includes Progress Energy, PSNC Energy, Piedmont Natural Gas, PowerSecure International, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Novo Nordisk, Pfizer, Biogen Idec and others. You can reach him at 919-829-8932 or