Tamarack Resort Creditor Sues, Seeks Foreclosure

By Matthew Frank, 3-12-08

The investment bank Credit Suisse started foreclosure proceedings against Tamarack Resort Tuesday with a lawsuit filed in district court in Valley County, Idaho.

The bank claims the upscale resort defaulted on its $250 million loan. The suit comes in the wake of the resort’s majority owners’ Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing last month.

Tamarack CEO Jean-Pierre Boespflug said in statement that the move was anticipated and will give the resort time to “either refinance, add a partner with additional financing or sell the resort to a suitable buyer capable of managing the asset with the continued interest of the community in mind.”

The possibility of selling the resort outright hadn’t been broached publicly until today.

“A lot of things are on the table,” said Tamarack public relations consultant Jessica Flynn. “There has been multiple interested investors and financial partners.”

Resort operations will continue, though Flynn said the resort may cut back its services during the typically slower end-of-winter and end-of-summer seasons.

Tamarack Resort owes more than $300 million to lenders and international banks, including about $262 million to Credit Suisse, and its majority owners filed for bankruptcy protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Boise February 15.

The two companies named in the bankruptcy filings are VPG Investments, Inc. and Cross Atlantic Real Estate, LLC, which own 27 and 48 percent of Tamarack Resort shares respectively. Boespflug owns Cross Atlantic Real Estate, and VPG is owned by Mexican businessman and resort co-founder Alfredo Miguel Afif.

The resort was counting on a $118 million dollar loan from the French bank Société Générale, Boespflug said, but the financing fell through. Société Générale suffered the loss of some $7 billion in a trading scandal.

If the companies hadn’t filed, Credit Suisse could have ended up with 75 percent ownership of the resort, and been “able to sell the company to whoever it wants,” Boespflug said.

The resort, which features skiing, golf, and numerous other activities as well as a wide variety of high-end real estate offerings, opened in 2004 after Afif and Boespflug took over a controversial and long-stalled ski resort project. It billed itself as the first new ski resort to be built in the United States in more than two decades. In 2006 Tamarack released a press statement touting a new financial plan allowing resort managers to borrow up to $250 million from a Credit Suisse fund.