Judge orders property returned to Eastern Pulp

PORTLAND – Former officers, employees and others involved with Eastern Pulp and Paper Corp. have been ordered to return any of the company’s property that they have removed.

U.S. Bankruptcy Chief Judge James B. Haines ordered the return after the trustee for Eastern Pulp’s bankrupt estate reported in two separate court hearings this week that several items, including a computer mainframe, had been taken out of Eastern Pulp’s headquarters in Amherst, Mass., and its mills in Lincoln and Brewer.

Fred Bopp III, a Portland attorney representing the trustee, told Haines that he asked former Eastern Pulp officers to return what was taken from the properties, and on Monday they agreed to do so.

On Tuesday, Bopp said the items he mentioned Monday had been returned, but they had not been inspected yet. In the meantime, he said, other items were reported as missing and needed to be brought back. He did not disclose what items were absent from the facilities.

Haines told Bopp on Tuesday that his order from the day before applies to all of Eastern Pulp’s property and remains in effect.

Eastern Pulp ceased to exist on Feb. 4 when Haines converted the company’s bankruptcy status to Chapter 7 or liquidation, after being in Chapter 11, which is protection from creditors. Immediately upon conversion, all of Eastern Pulp’s machinery, equipment, financial and other records, inventory and other assets became the property of a court-appointed trustee, Bangor attorney Gary Growe.

Joseph “Pepe” Torras Jr., the company’s former vice president, said Monday that the removal of certain pieces of equipment is “a small issue, really.”

“The equipment itself is worth very little money,” Torras said. “The information on it [the mainframe] relates to companies and not the bankruptcy. It was our desire to have access to the information. The office is being closed up, and we were worried we wouldn’t have access to it.”

Torras said a number of items considered missing actually were being removed from Amherst and were “on the way to the mills in Maine.”

“The buyers might have a need for it,” he said.