Family of West Virginia governor, running for Senate, has deal to avoid Greenbrier hotel foreclosure

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This article was published 22/08/2024 (792 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — The family of West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice has reached an agreement with a credit collection company to avoid the foreclosure of their historic hotel as he runs for U.S. Senate, the resort announced Thursday.

The Republican governor’s family had been set to appear in court Friday to ask a judge to halt the auction of The Greenbrier resort’s hotel, which had been scheduled for Tuesday. That hearing has been canceled.

“It’s taken care of, and we move forward, and The Greenbrier is as whole as it can possibly be,” Justice said at a news briefing. “The Greenbrier is going to be in our family forevermore.”

The 710-room hotel has hosted U.S. presidents, royalty and congressional retreats. The resort held a PGA Tour golf tournament from 2010 until 2019 and has welcomed NFL teams for training camp and practices. A once-secret 112,000-square-foot (10,080-square-meter) underground bunker built for Congress at the Greenbrier in case of nuclear attack during the Cold War now hosts tours.

The hotel came under threat of auction after JPMorgan Chase sold a longstanding loan taken out by the governor to a credit collection company, McCormick 101 — a subsidiary of Beltway Capital — which declared it to be in default. In a statement, the Justice family said it had reached an agreement with Beltway Capital to “receive a specific amount to be paid in full by October 24, 2024.”

The family said it had already secured the money, although the Justices did not specify the amount.

“Beltway reserves its rights if the Justice family fails to perform,” the statement reads.

A message left with Beltway Capital wasn’t immediately returned Thursday.

Justice defended his family’s business practices at Thursday’s briefing and repeated past claims that JPMorgan Chase’s sale of The Greenbrier loan was a politically motivated effort to hurt his U.S. Senate campaign.

“We had a 14-year working relationship with JPMorgan, and then shortly after the primary where I was the winner — hands down, you’re going to the U.S. Senate, no matter what anybody says under the sun — it makes, it made, total no sense other than political, it made no sense at all,” he said.

Justice said that his family had made payments on the JPMorgan loan as recently as June and that it was notified the loan had been sold in July without prior warning. JPMorgan Chase did not respond to an email seeking comment.

If the hotel had been sold, Justice said, “there would have been carnage and devastation like you can’t imagine to the great people of The Greenbrier,” referring to jobs that could have been lost.

The auction, which had been set to occur at a courthouse Tuesday in the small city of Lewisburg, involved 60.5 acres, including the hotel and parking lot.

Justice family attorneys filed a motion this week for a preliminary injunction to try to halt the auction of The Greenbrier. They claimed that a 2014 deed of trust approved by the governor was defective because JPMorgan didn’t obtain consent from the Greenbrier Hotel Corp.’s directors or owners, and that auctioning the property violates the company’s obligation to act in “good faith and deal fairly” with the corporation.

They also argued, in part, that the auction would harm the economy and threaten hundreds of jobs.

About 400 employees at The Greenbrier hotel received notice this week from an attorney for the health care provider Amalgamated National Health Fund saying they would lose coverage Tuesday, the scheduled date of the auction, unless the Justice family paid $2.4 million in missing contributions.

Peter Bostic, a union official with the Workers United Mid-Atlantic Regional Joint Board, said that the Justice family hasn’t contributed to employees’ health fund in four months, and that an additional $1.2 million in contributions will soon be due, according to the letter the board received from Ronald Richman, an attorney with Schulte Roth & Zabel LLP, the firm representing the fund.

The letter also said some contributions were taken out of employees’ paychecks but never transferred to the fund, concerning union officials.

Justice dismissed concerns about the claims Thursday, telling reporters that “insurance payments were made and were being made on a regular basis.”

“There is no way that the great union employees at The Greenbrier are going to go without insurance,” he said. “There is no possible way.”

Justice is running for U.S. Senate against Democrat Glenn Elliott, a former mayor of Wheeling. Justice, who owns dozens of companies and had a net worth estimated at $513 million by Forbes Magazine in 2021, has been accused in court cases of being late in paying millions for family business debts and fines for unsafe working conditions at his coal mines.

He began serving the first of his two terms as governor in 2017, after buying The Greenbrier out of bankruptcy in 2009.

Justice’s family also owns The Greenbrier Sporting Club, a private luxury community with a members-only “resort within a resort.” That property was scheduled to be auctioned off this year in an attempt by Carter Bank & Trust of Martinsville, Virginia, to recover more than $300 million in business loans defaulted by the governor’s family, but a court battle delayed that process.