Fourth Circuit Considers Reverse Piercing, Charging Orders, and Jurisdictional Challenges in Pilfered Cable Case

Sky Cable v. Coley (http://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/161920.P.pdf) examines the interplay between reverse piercing the corporate veil, the exclusivity of the charging order remedy, and jurisdiction over an unserved (with process) LLC based on its member’s acts.

In 2011, the plaintiff cable distributor sued two LLCs affiliated with an individual defendant (“Individual Defendant”) who was secretly supplying cable TV to over 2,000 rooms and pocketing the revenue.

After unsuccessfully trying to collect on a $2.3M judgment, plaintiff later moved to amend the judgment to include three LLCs connected to the Individual Defendant under a reverse veil-piercing theory. The Individual Defendant and one of the LLCs appealed the District Court order that broadened the scope of the judgment.

Affirming, the Fourth Circuit, applying Delaware law, found that the District Court properly reverse-pierced the Individual Defendant to reach LLC assets.

‘Reverse’ Veil Piercing

Unlike traditional veil piercing, which permits a court to hold an individual  shareholder personally liable for a corporate judgment, reverse piercing attaches liability to the entity for a judgment against a controlling individual. [10, 11]

Reverse piercing is especially apt in the one-member LLC context as there is no concern about prejudicing the rights of others LLC members if the LLC veil is pierced.

In predicting that a Delaware court would recognize reverse piercing, the Court held that if Delaware courts immunized an LLC from liability for a member’s debts, LLC members could hide assets with impunity to shirk creditors. [18, 19]

Charging Order Exclusivity?

The Court also rejected the Individual Defendant’s argument that Delaware’s charging statute, 6 Del. Code s. 18-703 was the judgment creditor’s exclusive remedy against an LLC member.

Delaware’s charging statute specifies that attachment, garnishment and foreclosure “or other legal or equitable remedies” are not available to the judgment creditor of an LLC member.

However, the Court found that piercing “is not the type of remedy that the [charging statute] was designed to prohibit” since the piercing remedy differs substantively from the creditor remedies mentioned in the charging statute.  The Court found that unlike common law creditor actions aimed at seizing a debtor’s property – piercing (or reverse-piercing) challenges the legitimacy of the LLC entity itself. As a result, the Court found that the plaintiff wasn’t confined to a charging order against the Individual Defendant’s LLC distributions.

The Court further held that applying Delaware’s charging law in a manner that precludes reverse piercing would impede Delaware’s interest in preventing its state-chartered corporate entities from being used as “vehicles for fraud”
by debtors trying to escape its debts. [20-22]

Alter Ego Finding

The Court also agreed with the lower court’s finding that the LLC judgment debtor was the Individual Defendant’s alter ego.  In Delaware, a creditor can establish does not have to show actual fraud. Instead, it (the creditor) can establish alter ego liability by demonstrating a “mingling of the operations of the entity and its owner plus an ‘overall element of injustice or unfairness.” [24-25]

Here, the evidence in the record established that the Individual Defendant and his three LLCs operated as a single economic unit.  The Court also noted the Individual Defendant’s failure to observe basic corporate formalities, lack of accounting records and obvious commingling of funds as alter ego signposts.

The most egregious commingling examples cited by the court included one LLC paying another entity’s taxes, insurance and mortgage obligations. The Court found it suspicious (to say the least) that the individual Defendant took mortgage interest deductions on his personal tax returns when an LLC was ostensibly paying a separate LLC’s mortgage.

Still more alter ego evidence lay in Defendant’s reporting an LLC’s profit and loss on his individual return. Defendant also could not explain at his deposition what amounts he received as income from the various LLCs.

Can LLC Member’s Post-Judgment Acts Subject LLC to Jurisdiction?

The Court also affirmed the District Court’s exercise of jurisdiction over the LLC judgment debtor based on the Individual Defendant’s acts even though the LLC was never served with process in the underlying suit.

Normally, service of summons and the operative pleading on a defendant is a precondition to a court’s exercise of personal jurisdiction over him. However, a court has “vicarious jurisdiction” over an individual where his corporate alter ego is properly before the court.  In such a case, an individual’s jurisdictional contacts are imputed to the alter ego entity.

The reverse can be true, too: where an LLC’s lone member is already before the Court, there is no concern that the LLC receive independent notice (through service of summons, e.g.) of the litigation. (This is because there are no other members to give due process protections to.)

Applying these rules, the Fourth Circuit found jurisdiction over the LLC was proper since the Individual Defendant appeared and participated in post-judgment proceedings. [30-36]

Afterwords:

Sky Cable presents a thorough discussion of the genesis and evolution of reverse veil-piercing and a creditor’s dogged and creative efforts to reach assets of a single-member LLC.

Among other things, the case makes clear that where an LLC is so dominated and controlled by one of its members at both the financial and business policy levels, the LLC and member will be considered alter egos of each other.

Another case lesson is that a judgment creditor of an LLC member won’t be limited to a charging order where the creditor seeks to challenge the LLC’s legitimacy; through either a traditional piercing or non-traditional reverse-piercing remedy.

Debtor’s Use of LLC As ‘Personal Piggy Bank’ Leads to Turnover and Charging Orders

Golfwood Square, LLC v. O’Malley, 2018 IL App(1st) 172220-U, examines the interplay between a charging order and a third party citation to discover assets turnover order against an LLC member debtor.  The plaintiff in Golfwood engaged in a years’ long effort to unspool a judgment debtor’s multi-tiered business entity arrangement in the hopes of collecting a sizeable (about $1M) money judgment.

Through post-judgment proceedings, the plaintiff learned that the debtor owned a 90% interest in an LLC (Subsidiary or Sub-LLC) that was itself the sole member of another LLC (Parent LLC) that received about $225K from the sale of a Chicago condominium.

Plaintiff also discovered the defendant had unfettered access to Parent LLC’s bank account and had siphoned over $80K from it since the judgment date.

In 2013 and 2017, plaintiff respectively obtained a charging order against Sub-LLC and a turnover order against Parent LLC in which the plaintiff sought to attach the remaining condominium sale proceeds.  The issue confronting the court was whether a judgment creditor could get a turnover order against a parent company to enforce a prior charging order against a subsidiary entity.  In deciding for the creditor, the Court examined the content and purpose of citations to discover assets turnover orders and LLC charging orders.

Code Section 2-1402 empowers a judgment creditor can issue supplementary proceedings to discover whether a debtor is in possession of assets or whether a third party is holding assets of a debtor that can be applied to satisfy a judgment.

Section 30-20 of the Limited Liability Company Act allows that same judgment creditor to apply for a charging order against an LLC member’s distributional interest in a limited liability company. Once a charging order issues from the court, it becomes a lien (or “hold”) on the debtor’s distributional interest and requires the LLC to pay over to the charging order recipient all distributions that would otherwise be paid to the judgment debtor. 735 ILCS 5/2-1402; 805 ILCS 180/30-20. Importantly, a charging order applicant does not have to name the LLC(s) as a party defendant(s) since the holder of the charging order doesn’t gain membership or management rights  in the LLC. [⁋⁋ 22, 35]

Under Parent LLC’s operating agreement, once the condominium was sold, Parent LLC was to dissolve and distribute all assets directly to Sub-LLC – Parent’s lone member.  From there, any distributions from Sub-LLC should have gone to defendant (who held a 90% ownership interest in Sub-LLC) and then turned over to the plaintiff.

However, defendant circumvented the charging order by accessing the sale proceeds (held in Parent LLC’s account) and distributing them to himself. The Court noted that documents produced during post-judgment discovery showed that the defendant spent nearly $80,000 of the sale proceeds on his personal debts and to pay off his other business obligations.

Based on the debtor’s conduct in accessing and dissipating Parent LLC’s bank account with impunity, and preventing Parent LLC from distributing the assets to Sub-LLC, where they could be reached by plaintiff, the trial court ordered the debtor to turn all Parent LLC’s remaining account funds over to the plaintiff to enforce the earlier charging order against Sub-LLC.

The court rejected the defendant’s argument that Parent LLC was in serious debt and that the condo sale proceeds were needed to pay off its debts. The Court found this argument clashed with defendant’s deposition testimony where he stated under oath that Parent LLC “had no direct liabilities.” This judicial admission – a clear, unequivocal statement concerning a fact within a litigant’s knowledge – was binding on the defendant and prevented him from trying to contradict this testimony. The argument also fell short in light of defendant’s repeatedly raiding Parent LLC’s account to pay his personal debts and those of his other business ventures all to the exclusion of plaintiff.

The court then summarily dispensed with defendant’s claim that the plaintiff improperly pierced the corporate veils of Parent LLC and Sub-LLC in post-judgment proceedings. In Illinois, a judgment creditor typically cannot pierce a corporate veil in supplementary proceedings. Instead, it must file a new action in which it seeks piercing as a remedy for an underlying cause of action.

The Court found that the trial court’s turnover order did not hold defendant personally liable for either LLC’s debt. Instead, the turnover order required Parent LLC to turnover assets belonging to the judgment debtor – the remaining condominium sale proceeds – to the plaintiff creditor.

Afterwords:

This case presents in sharp relief the difficulty of collecting a judgment from a debtor who operates under a protective shield of several layers of corporate entities.

Where a debtor uses an LLC’s assets as his “personal piggy bank,” Golfwood and cases like it show that a court won’t hesitate to vindicate a creditor’s recovery right through use of a turnover and charging order.

The case is also noteworthy as it illustrates a court looking to an LLC operating agreement for textual support for its turnover order.

LLC Stopped From Selling Member’s Residence In Violation of Prior Charging Order – Utah Federal Court

Q: Can A Court Stop An LLC That Pays the Monthly Mortgage of One of Its Members From Selling that Member’s Home Where A Charging Order Has Issued Against the LLC to Enforce a Money Judgment Against the LLC Member?

A: Yes.

Q2: How So?

A2: By selling the member’s property and paying off the member’s mortgage with the sale proceeds, the LLC is effectively “paying the member” to the exclusion of the plaintiff judgment creditor.

Source: Earthgrains Baking Companies, Inc. v. Sycamore Family Bakery, Inc., et al, USDC Utah 2015 (https://casetext.com/case/earthgrains-baking-cos-v-sycamore-family-bakery-inc-3)

In this case, the plaintiff won a multi-million dollar money judgment against a corporate and individual defendant in a trademark dispute.  The plaintiff then secured a charging order against a LLC of which the individual defendant was a 48% member.  When the LLC failed to respond to the charging order, the plaintiff moved for an order of contempt against the LLC and sought to stop the LLC from selling the defendant’s home.

The court granted the contempt motion.  First, the court found that it had jurisdiction over the LLC.  The LLC argued that Utah lacked jurisdiction over it since the LLC was formed in Nevada.  The LLC claimed that under the “internal affairs” doctrine, the state of the LLC’s formation – Nevada – governs legal matters concerning the LLC.

Disagreeing, the court noted that a LLC’s internal affairs are limited only to “matters peculiar to the relationships among or between the corporation and its current officers, directors, and shareholders.”  The internal affairs doctrine does not apply to claims of third party creditors.  Here, since the plaintiff was a creditor of the LLC’s member, this was not a dispute between LLC and member.  As a result, the internal affairs rule didn’t apply and the Utah court had jurisdiction over the LLC since a LLC member lived in Utah.  (See Cosgrove v. Bartolotta, 150 F.3d 729, 731 (7th Cir. 1998)).

The Charging Order required the LLC to pay any distribution that would normally go to the member directly to the plaintiff until the money judgment was satisfied.  The Charging Order specifically mentions transfers characterized or designated as payment for defendant’s “loans,” among other things.

The LLC was making monthly mortgage payments on the member’s home and listed the home for sale in the amount of $4M.  Plaintiff wanted to prevent the sale since there was a prior $2M mortgage on the home.

In blocking the sale, the court found that if the LLC sold the member’s home and paid off the member’s mortgage lender with the proceeds, this would violate the Charging Order since it would constitute an indirect payment to the member.  The court deemed any payoff of the member’s mortgage a “distribution” (a direct or indirect transfer of money or property from LLC to member) under the Utah’s LLC Act. (Utah Code Ann. § 48-2c-102(5)(a)).

Since the Charging Order provided that any loan payments involving the member were to be paid to the plaintiff until the judgment is satisfied, the court found that to allow the LLC to sell the property and disburse the proceeds to a third party (the lender) would harm the plaintiff in its ability to satisfy the judgment.

Afterwords:

An interesting case that discusses the intricacies of charging orders and the thorny questions that arise when trying to figure out where to sue an LLC that has contacts in several states.  The case portrays a court willing to give an expansive interpretation of what constitutes an indirect distribution from an LLC to its member. 

Earthgrains also reflects a court endeavoring to protect a creditor’s judgment rights where an LLC and its member appear to be engaging in misdirection (if not outright deception) in order to elude the creditor.

[A special thanks to attorney and Forbes contributor Jay Adkisson for alerting me to this case (http://www.forbes.com/sites/jayadkisson/)]