What a croc!
Systems Management Solutions (SMSG which later became SSLR) owned the plant. SSMG was initially managed by Thomas Cloud II and Robert Wilson who took it through a couple of iterations before it gained control of the plant at Poteet.
They first tried to sell it off to Dennis McLaughlin III at EBOF, then that deal fell apart. When that deal was initiated, it was reported that the plant had been put into operation and they were unable to make it work because of the costs associated with the feedstock. Based on what I have heard from others intimately familiar with the deal, McLaughlin came into the deal with an agreement to provide a line of credit that they could use to acquire feedstock for the purpose of processing "biodiesel" for EBOF. Then it was alleged that McLaughlin renigged on payments to Cargill which is what brought on the litigation against the whole group at SMSG and EBOF.
SMSG made a couple of token payments, and then went into default on the settlement. The payments were made by McLaughlin and EBOF because they were the ones who were liable on the "Line of Credit". This is where it is alleged that McLaughlin renigged the second time - first on maintaining the payments on the line of credit and then on the litigation settlement payments that were agreed to.
During that time period, SMSG (SSLR) made an announcement to sell the plant to GAEC (f/k/a GFET) in early 2008. The announcement that SMSG was going to sell the plant to GFET was done sometime during the month of January 2008 - several months after Cargill slapped a lien on the plant. At that same time, AETE.pk/Meridian issued a Letter to J. T. Cloud (Thomas Cloud's father) recinding all agreements on January 14 because of a "material default" when they refused to make the schedueled payments to Meridian on the technology Liscense Agreemnt with GFET (JT's company). The whole charade was never to be as SSLR already knew it could not transfer ownership of the plant to GAEC without the Cargill lein being removed.
This is a very serious problem for the following reasons -
First, the plant has been shut down completely since December 2007 and has not produced any product. All operating employees, according to the SSLR financials, were discharged and are no longer with the company or the asset. There was also a problem with the cleanup of this facility just as with the EBOF plant in Oklahoma.
Second, it is reported that the price of $3 million is artificially inflated because of the condition of the equipment after being out of operation for something approaching two years during which time the equipment has deteriorated substantially. The whole plant would probably not bring scrap price by the pound at this point if a real set of engineers did an evaluation of the facility. According to the last financials, NWND has less than $30k of assets and cash - it is unclear how they have paid for such a large asset.
Third, with the Cargill Lein in place nothing is going to happen with this facility until that lien is satisfied.
Fourth - this is the 2nd attempt by SSLR to sell the plant to a sister company that will benefit from the sham announcement when they know there is a lien on the plant - a situation that is already under close scrutiny by the SEC (ref. GAEC and SSLR trading suspensions)
