One of the by-products of the formal transfer of the one-time holdings of Jeffrey Prosser to the Rural Telephone Finance Cooperative has been the RTFC’s recent payment of $10.7 million to the “two pension plans previously sponsored by the Debtor [i.e., Prosser, the former owner and CEO of Innovative Telephone, and his corporations].”
This was reported on Oct. 6 by Stan Springel, the bankruptcy court-appointed Chapter 11 trustee in the case.
The trustee told the court, in this connection, “With the consent of the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation [PBGC, a federal corporation], each pension plan has been assumed by DTR Holdings, LLC and all liens and claims filed by the PBGC against the Debtor and its parent debtors have been withdrawn (or are in the process of being withdrawn).”
The identity of DTR Holdings was not immediately clear, but presumably is an entity that handles once-troubled pension plans. In the Prosser collection of financial entities there had been two pension plans, one for Vitelco (now Innovative Telephone) and the other for the Virgin Islands Daily News. Employees of other Prosser firms were covered by one or the other plan.
That the liens have been withdrawn or are being withdrawn indicates that the PBGC is amenable to the new arrangements. (In the earlier stages of the Prosser bankruptcy hearings that entity was often represented by lawyers who told the court that it had been short-changed by the Prosser corporations.)
Springel also reported that RTFC “is making a payment to the Rural Utilities Service (RUS) to refinance the debt owed to the RUS by Virgin Islands Telephone Corporation.”
RUS, an arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, guarantees the loan that is handled by the Federal Financing Bank, an obscure part of the Department of the Treasury, from which Prosser had borrowed about $60 million during the Bush Administration. Prosser, at first, and later the trustee, has paid the bank regularly over the years, and a recent Federal Financing Bank press release indicated that the loan had been rolled over at about $54 million.
The Federal Financing Bank and the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, both with federal ties, appear to be the only major creditors in the long, drawn-out Prosser bankruptcy proceedings that have not absorbed substantial losses.
