Almost exactly two years to the day since the Alaska Dispatch News first declared bankruptcy, the estate is largely settled.
One last detail was a claim by one of the creditors — Alice Rogoff, the owner of the bankrupt estate, herself.
A motion by Rogoff, the former owner of the now-bankrupt Alaska Dispatch News, was heard this week: Rogoff wanted to have some of her legal fees paid. That claim has been holding up disbursement of whatever funds remain in the estate to a long list of creditors.
In May of 2014, Rogoff bought the Anchorage Daily News from the McClatchy Company for $34 million. She had borrowed about $13 million from Northrim Bank to close the deal, sold the building the newspaper occupied in East Anchorage to GCI (and rented back some of the space for the printing operation), and she merged the operations of the online Alaska Dispatch News with the Anchorage Daily News, calling the entire operation the Alaska Dispatch News.
She ended up selling the Alaska Dispatch News in 2017 to the Binkley Companies as a crush of bills were drawing lawsuits. She — rather, the Alaska Dispatch News — filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Aug. 12, 2017.
Two years later, she is still trying to get at the front of the line as a creditor. The bankruptcy judge on Wednesday said no.
That’s the simple history.
The full history is convoluted by shell corporations. The Alaska Dispatch News was owned by AK Publishing LLC, which was owned the Moon and the Stars LLC, which was owned by Rogoff.
Through these entities she controlled the ADN, and she named herself chief executive officer, with Tony Hopfinger a part owner and executive editor. There were a host of personal guarantees thrown around as she contracted with companies to begin moving the press operations out of the GCI building.
[Read: Rogoff loses to former business partner Tony Hopfinger]
Then the bills came in and her entities moved money around to pay them, as she poured her personal wealth into the companies, before simply stopping to pay creditors at all. Creditors began to sue.
Through her lawyers, Rogoff this week was insisting that nearly $70,000 of her initially paid attorney fees go to the head of the line for collection from the company she had owned and operated. It’s likely a fraction of her actual legal fees.
Alaska Bankruptcy Court Judge Gary Spraker said this amount that Rogoff paid out in early attorney fees will be paid to her at the same ratio all other creditors get. She’s just another creditor of her failed company.
There’s likely very little to disperse from the Dispatch, possibly as little as 10 percent of what the company, now under the control of a trustee, owes dozens of creditors. Rogoff has likely spent tens of thousands of dollars to get her attorney fee claim paid first, only to fail once again. In fact, she may get less in the end than what she paid her attorneys to fight this remaining detail.
Rogoff has already settled separately with GCI, Arctic Partners, M&M Wiring Services, and Tony Hopfinger, her former business partner with whom there was a separate lawsuit before Rogoff’s company was decreed a lost cause by the courts and put into Chapter 7 liquidation.
Personally, I am more interested in her Halibut Cove accident.
Thanks for the update, Susan.
The ADN slander machine – even though now owned by the leftist Alaska Binkley crowd – that brought us the fake “sex scandal” of the Alaska Army National Guard to bring down a perfectly competent conservative governor loves media silence when it comes to exposing the normal results of leftist ideology married to deception – namely, abject failure.
When Obama came to Alaska for the photo op of a spawned-out salmon piddling his milt onto the patent leather shoes of his visiting highness, his first stop, once in PFD land, the land of $66 Billion reasons for visiting Alaska, was the home of Ms. Alice Rogoff. That connectivity does not seem to have helped her evade the consequences of of a life of deception – even with husband David Rubenstein’s billions of pocket change for cannon fodder.
The fact that all her leftist buddies now leave her twisting in the fickle winds of their chase for power simply affirms for me the confidence they have in their power to control the media no matter the person at the helm. If I were anywhere in a leftist helm of media power right now, I would be watching my backside like a hawk. Whether by raw use of economic pressure, or by “me too” movement politics, or by suddenly found unprovable sexual assault charges, or by convenient “suicide” in prison, the power brokers appear to be wanting some new front line leftist faces and facades. It is time to duck and cover if you are a front lines lackey for the left.
Anyway, even if I am right about how this is presently playing out, what we really need is someone with your skills to have the time, funds and security guards enough to really dig the truth of all this out and publish it in book form. Then the threshold of undeniability might be crossed such that someone of in the judicial system would pony up the guts to act against the globalist agenda undermining our constitutional government. There is the real risk that you might get killed politically or economically, and I am not volunteering you for martyrdom of some sort; but I do figure that some sort of sacrifice is going to be needed to turn this thing around back towards liberty and truth. That believed, the small sacrifice of my first donation to Must Read Alaska is coming your way. Kudos for your work.
Ahhhhhh. Poor Alice . . . not.
The ADN is a propaganda mill for the Left.
The articles are bent, more opinion than reporting, the op-eds from the WAPO are hit pieces on Trump, mostly ad hominem attacks, and the Alaska opinion pieces are simply hit pieces on Dunleavy–no substance, no suggested remedy, other than spend, spend, spend, and ad hominem attacks on a guy who wants to balance the budget and get gov’t under control.
No wonder the ADN is bankrupt.
That’s a tough break for that execrable woman.
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