I don't know if you understand how leases work in these cases (no offense).
Just like when you rent out a house to a tenent, the tenent isn't responsible for getting a mortgage from you to buy the house. They just have to pay monthly rent.
In the pit case, Mitchell leased the pit to Phoenix for monthly royalties for whatever they mined (that's Phoenix's "rent"). In other words, as each truck load of material was moved off, it hits a scale, and Phoenix pays a small royalty to Mitchell (usually much less than $1 a ton). Keep in mind, that Pre-Katrina, Mitchell didn't value the pit very much (in fact, neither did Phoenix). Anyway, there were no restricted shares needed to acquire the lease. In fact, it might be hard to believe, but Phoenix only paid $100 for it when Murphy assigned it to them and Mitchell agreed to the assignment. Again, all Mitchell cared about was that someone was savvy (dumb?) enough to mine their little backwoods pit and pay them a little for whatever they could mine of value.
As far as restricted common shares pre-Chapter 11, there were some...about 2,500,000-7,500,000 total with a 2 year non-dilution clause. They would have all entered the float pre-Chapter 11 and pre-Katrina and pre-you or I knowing anything about this company. In fact, it's possible that you and I own a few of them. Well at least I'm trying to own a few more of them with all the major things in the works. ;)
Checkout Edgar databases a little more indepth and you can find verification of what I am talking about.
"Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn." C.S. Lewis
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