{"id":16309,"date":"2023-04-20T21:30:27","date_gmt":"2023-04-20T21:30:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/us-supreme-court-allows\/"},"modified":"2023-04-20T21:34:00","modified_gmt":"2023-04-20T21:34:00","slug":"us-supreme-court-allows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/us-supreme-court-allows\/","title":{"rendered":"US Supreme Court allows Mall of America to fight cheap Sears lease"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Dietrich Knauth<\/p>\n

(Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that the Mall of America outside Minneapolis – the nation’s largest shopping complex – can challenge an extremely cheap lease it made decades ago with Sears Holdings Corp, which was subsequently sold to a new owner during the department store chain’s bankruptcy.<\/p>\n

In a 9-0 ruling written by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the Supreme Court overturned a lower court’s decision against MOAC Mall Holdings LLC, the parent company of the mega-mall located in Bloomington, Minnesota. The ruling means that MOAC Mall Holdings can proceed with its challenge to the lease in a lower court as it seeks the ability to charge more to rent the space that Sears had occupied.<\/p>\n

The company has argued that it should no longer be bound by a 100-year lease initially signed in 1991 with Sears, long a retail giant but a company that has since withered. The lease provided Sears with a three-story, 120,000-square foot (11,000 square meters) location at the mall for a rent of just $10 a year. <\/p>\n

The Sears location has been closed since 2019, and Mall of America said in court filings it wanted to start over with a new lease rather than allowing the new leaseholder to sublease the space at the cheap rate. <\/p>\n

After Sears went bankrupt in 2018, it sold its assets for $5.2 billion to former chairman Eddie Lampert and his hedge fund ESL Investments Inc, and the lease was transferred months later to Transform Holdco LLC, a company formed by the new Sears owners.<\/p>\n

Mall of America went to court to try to stop the lease transfer during the Sears bankruptcy process. A federal judge in New York threw out the lawsuit and the Manhattan-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found in 2021 that bankruptcy law does not allow for appeals of court-approved bankruptcy sales.<\/p>\n

While bankruptcy law limits the ability of courts to unwind a sale after appeal, it does not prevent appeals entirely, the Supreme Court ruled. <\/p>\n

\n

(Reporting by Dietrich Knauth in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)<\/p>\n

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By Dietrich Knauth (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that the Mall of America outside Minneapolis – the nation’s largest shopping complex – can challenge an extremely cheap lease it made decades ago with Sears Holdings Corp, which was subsequently sold to a new owner during the department store chain’s bankruptcy. In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":16310,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1213],"tags":[1223],"class_list":["post-16309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-u-s-business","tag-updated"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-content\/uploads\/Reuters_Direct_Media\/USOnlineReportBusinessNews\/tagreuters.com2023binary_LYNXMPEJ3I0NJ-VIEWIMAGE.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16309"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16311,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16309\/revisions\/16311"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}