Bestwall responds to claimants’ motion for bankruptcy case dismissal

By Sarah Lizee

Olympia, Wash., March 9 – Bestwall LLC responded Wednesday to a motion from two claimants that seeks to have the debtor’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy case dismissed, according to documents filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of North Carolina.

As background, Bestwall, an affiliate of Atlanta-based pulp and paper company Georgia Pacific, filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 2, 2017.

On July 19, 2019, the court denied the official committee of asbestos claimants’ motion to dismiss the case.

Bestwall said the latest dismissal motion raises many, if not all, of the same issues as the previous one, and came just one day after the debtor, the asbestos claimants committee and the future claimants’ representative announced to the court they had reached agreement on outstanding discovery disputes, clearing a path to estimation.

Bestwall said there are no changes in circumstance that could warrant any departure from the court’s findings in 2019, that Bestwall had sufficient financial distress and had filed the Chapter 11 case for a valid bankruptcy purpose.

The company also said the committee – the movant in the first motion to dismiss – filed a notice of appeal of the 2019 opinion and order. The appeal remains pending in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina. As such, the bankruptcy court lacks the jurisdiction to consider the new motion to dismiss, because the committee and movants seek the same relief on fundamentally the same grounds, Bestwall said.

Bestwall also said it’s too late for the movants to allege that the case was filed in bath faith from the start.

“The time for movants or any other party to move to dismiss this case as a bad faith filing was long ago,” the company said in the response.

“The committee did so; its motion was litigated and denied.”

A hearing on the motion is scheduled for March 15.

Bestwall’s Chapter 11 case number is 17-31795.

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