NewPage’s creditors to descend on courthouse
Posted Sep 23, 2011 05:02:15 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Port Hawkesbury paper company NewPage will return to Supreme Court this morning in its latest step toward creditor protection.
There are at least a dozen individuals, companies and groups with creditor status in the case who may or may not see payouts as the court process unfolds.
As Premier Darrell Dexter explains the Nova Scotia government is doing its part to ensure one group gets paid.
“We owe NewPage for silviculture work that was done on Crown land,” Premier Dexter told reporters following a cabinet meeting Thursday. “We requested permission from the monitor to pay that directly to the people who did the work.”
The Premier explains the province holds a silviculture and woodsman fund which may go toward paying more groups that have been left in the lurch by the mill’s closure.
“If there’s money going to be coming forward, that so much of that would be reserved for the unsecured creditors. But that, ultimately, would be determined by the courts, who falls into which class,” said Premier Dexter.
NewPage’s biggest creditor is Nova Scotia Power, which is owed $9.8 million.
The power company has agreed to defer recovery of those costs for one year as NewPage courts potential buyers.
But Port Hawkesbury Mayor Billy Joe MacLean says the rising power rates are acting as a deterrent to any interested parties.
“Those increases in power rates are going to be detrimental to the new person coming in,” MacLean told the Rick Howe Show, Thursday, referring to NSP’s application to raise power rates by 5 per cent in January.
Meanwhile, the Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaq Chiefs says it won’t stand in the way of a sale, but say treaty rights must be considered in any deal.
