Skiffs sit on shore in the Southwest Alaska fishing town of King Cove. (Photo by James Brooks)
An array of businesses, fishing companies and investors are objecting to a pending proposal to sell the assets of a struggling Alaska seafood company to Rodger May — one of the original investors in the company before it entered a bankruptcy-like process called receivership.
The financial firm that’s overseeing Peter Pan Seafood’s receivership proposed last week to sell the company’s three processing plants and an array of other assets to May, an entrepreneur and fish trader who narrowly outbid another processing company, Silver Bay Seafoods, in an auction.
A hearing on the proposal is set for Thursday in a Seattle courtroom, where a judge will consider the wide-ranging objections filed in court last week by opponents of the sale.
Those opponents include the investors who originally partnered with May to buy Peter Pan from a Japanese seafood conglomerate in 2020.
The investors — including affiliates of Los Angeles-based Renewable Resources Group and Anchorage-based McKinley Management — split with May in their filing, calling him an “insider whose inequitable conduct has both depressed the market for, and eroded the value of, Peter Pan’s assets.”
They say that Silver Bay is a better fit to buy the assets given opposition by the “Alaskan fishing community” to May’s continued involvement in Peter Pan.
They also argue that May shouldn’t be allowed to apply $12 million in credit to his bid based on money he loaned Peter Pan. That’s because another businessman, Los Angeles-based John Ketcham, also loaned $10 million to the company last year on the condition that he would be repaid before May, according to the investors’ filing, which Ketcham also signed onto.
Ketcham has teamed up with Silver Bay and wants to use his loan as credit to buy one of Peter Pan’s three plants, in the remote Alaska Peninsula area called Port Moller.
May didn’t respond to a request for comment this week.
Nathaniel Herz welcomes tips at natherz@gmail.com or (907) 793-0312. This article was originally published in Northern Journal, a newsletter from Herz. Subscribe at this link.