Judge grants company's request for access Bender contract

GulfMark Offshore Inc. contracted with Bender Shipbuilding & Repair Co. in Mobile to build three 245-foot boats.

They were never built.

GulfMark responded in June by joining two other companies in trying to force Bender into bankruptcy in an effort to recoup its $44.7 million investment. Bender in July converted the Chapter 7 bankruptcy into a Chapter 11 case in hopes of staying in business.

On Tuesday, GulfMark got a long-sought order from a bankruptcy judge for Bender to hand over business records relating to contracts it had with another firm, OSG/Maritrans, from June 1, 2008.

Today at Bender's shipyard on the Mobile waterfront, a single GulfMark boat is about half finished.

"We should have one finished boat and one mostly finished boat," said Eric Breithaupt, an attorney for the Houston-based company.

The company suspects that Bender used its money to settle a dispute with OSG/Maritrans. Breithaupt said his client wants to find out what happened to its money, which he termed, "not an unreasonable request."

Citing a confidentiality agreement with OSG/Maritrans, Bender lawyers contended they could not produce the records without a court order.

OSG/Maritrans objected to release of the documents, arguing that the records have nothing to do with Bender's bankruptcy. OSG/Maritrans attorney Scott Rutsky characterized the effort as a pretext for a planned lawsuit by GulfMark against his client.

"We think this is GulfMark looking for any deep pocket to blame their lot in life on," Rutsky said.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Margaret A. Mahoney noted that the documents eventually would have to be given to GulfMark as part of a separate "adversarial" bankruptcy case that GulfMark initiated. But Breithaupt said time is of the essence because new regulations that will go into effect in July will require boats to be double-hulled.

That will make the single-hulled boats under construction at Bender worthless if they are not finished by then. At this point, Breithaupt said, GulfMark has written off the possibility of getting all three boats built. If it is "extraordinarily lucky," he said, it might get two of them finished.

"We are in a time crunch to get these things done," he said.

Mahoney noted that a committee of unsecured creditors in the Bender bankruptcy case already has the OSG/Maritrans records in question.

"I think it's appropriate for this document to be available," she said. "I think it's important to the case — what came into this debtor and where it went."