Displaying items by tag: debt

The city of Venice is considering selling works by artists such as Gustav Klimt and Marc Chagall. The city’s mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, told the Italian news agency Ansa that he may seek to reduce Venice’s soaring debt by deaccessioning major pieces from the city’s most famous public museums.

The Royal Tapestry Factory in Madrid is due to file for bankruptcy after it failed to resolve its spiralling debts. The factory’s accumulated losses stood at nearly €6m in 2013, while a lack of funds means its 52 employees have not been paid for four months. Its electricity supply is also on the verge of being cut off, according to the Spanish newspaper El Pais.

Monica Oriole, the president of the foundation that runs the factory, resigned following a board meeting on 13 July, in which it was agreed the company would begin the process of applying for bankruptcy.

According to the New York Post's Page Six column, a multimillionaire investor who deliberately keeps himself cash poor through a maze of trusts and byzantine financial arrangements, was ordered by a Supreme court judge to turn over $2 million worth of art, antiques, furs, and jewelry in order to satisfy a longstanding debt. According to the Post, the property in question includes work by Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver has raised $8.5 million in a fundraising effort to eliminate the debt it incurred during construction.

The Prosperity Campaign was launched it 2012. This recent fundraising reduces the museum's total bank liability from $11.8 million when the building was completed in 2007 to a current level of $2.7 million.

It is a sad 20th birthday for the Musée Maillol in Paris, which shut its doors indefinitely this weekend. The museum has posted a message on its website that says the closure is due to planned renovation work, but there is more to the story. On February 5, the company that manages the museum, Tecniarte, filed for bankruptcy.

According to court filings, with only €11,000 in cash in its coffers, Tecniarte could not possibly cover its €3.3m debt, which is “due immediately.” The list of creditors has not been made public and the foundation that runs the museum has declined to comment since the bankruptcy filing.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is preparing to launch “the most high-profile cultural building project in New York over the next ten years,” Thomas Campbell, the museum’s director, recently told "Vanity Fair." Now, the institution is putting its money where its mouth is. The Met is planning a $250 million bond offering on January 26 to finance capital infrastructure improvements over the next decade, according to Moody’s Investors Service.

The Met’s $250 million increase in debt coincides with an ambitious plan to overhaul its Modern and contemporary galleries. Although the museum has not tapped an architect or revealed a budget for the project, Campbell hopes to finish the gut renovation in time for the Met’s 150th anniversary in 2020.

With the continued controversy surrounding the sale of two Andy Warhol paintings, "Triple Elvis" (1963) and "Four Marlons" (1966), having been sold by the Westspiel casino conglomerate. Museum directors in North Rhine-Westphalia sent a petition to the regional government in an attempt to prevent the paintings' sale at Christie's New York last November.

In the ongoing storm of protest is emerged that the casino chain Westspiel is in fact a subsidiary of the State Bank of North Rhine-Westphalia. A fact that prompted German culture minister Monika Grütters of the center-right CDU party to accuse North Rhine-Westphalia's center-left-led regional government of selling the artworks in order consolidate state debts.

A federal judge approved Detroit's bankruptcy plan today, allowing the city government to hit the reset button after its years of financial mismanagement. As part of the deal, which took a relatively speedy 16 months to complete, the city is eliminating $7 billion worth of debt—some creditors will be paid just 14 cents on the dollar—while slicing pension payments to its retired workforce by 4.5 percent (and ending their cost of living increases, and upping their health plan costs, and ... you get the idea, it's unpleasant). Meanwhile, the blueprint sets aside $1.7 billion over the next decade to cover critical needs, like demolishing abandoned homes and buying new fire trucks and ambulances.

As many outlets are noting, the bankruptcy could have been far lengthier, and even more painful for retirees, had it not been for an unusual deal designed to save the Detroit Institute of Arts while minimizing cuts to pensions.

The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) has cleared its biggest remaining hurdle to secure its art collection. Last week, the city of Detroit reached a settlement with its largest holdout creditor, the Financial Guaranty Insurance Company (FGIC). As Detroit’s 16-month-long bankruptcy trial comes to a close this week, the 11th-hour deal all but guarantees that the DIA’s collection will not be sold to pay down the city’s debt.

The bond insurer FGIC—which is owed around $1bn of Detroit’s $18bn debt—was one of the most vocal opponents to the so-called “Grand Bargain”, a scheme to safeguard the DIA’s collection while generating money for the city’s pensioners.

When Delaware Art Museum leaders announced in 2001 an ambitious plan to nearly double the size of the institution's Kentmere Parkway location, they likely had no clue the project would threaten to bankrupt the institution – twice.

In the end, the $32.5 million expansion plagued by cost overruns and construction delays saddled the museum with a crushing debt, which severely depleted its investment reserve fund and discouraged corporate and individual donations.