Crain's Chicago Business reports:
Developer Daniel Mahru, a former business partner of Antoin Rezko, has filed for personal protection from creditors, saying he has assets of $50,000 or less and debts of more than $10 million.
Mr. Mahru was CEO of Chicago-based Rezmar Corp., a development company he co-owned with Mr. Rezko, between 1989 and 2005. Mr. Rezko, who was Rezmar’s chairman and a former fundraiser for Gov. Rod Blagojevich, is awaiting sentencing on federal fraud charges.
In a bankruptcy petition filed last week in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Chicago, Mr. Mahru does not list his debts, which the filing says are between $10 million and $50 million.
Mr. Mahru, who now has his own company, blamed Mr. Rezko for his financial troubles, saying Mr. Rezko has not lived up to the terms of a September 2005 buyout of Mr. Mahru’s stake in Rezmar?
“I’m forced into this position because of Mr. Rezko,” said Mr. Mahru, CEO of Chicago-based Radian Development LLC. The bankruptcy filing “is not my first choice, it’s my last choice,” he added.
As part of the buyout agreement, Mr. Rezko agreed to reimburse Mr. Mahru in connection with any Rezmar-related litigation, Mr. Mahru said. Mr. Rezko also agreed to pay a $2-million promissory note, Mr. Mahru said, and make an additional payment, which Mr. Mahru declined to disclose.
One of Mr. Rezko’s lawyers, Joseph Duffy of Chicago law firm Stetler & Duffy Ltd., declined to comment.
Rezmar began as an affordable-housing developer before undertaking larger townhouse and single-family home developments in Chicago. The firm’s most ambitious project was never built, a massive mixed-use development on a 62-acre site at Roosevelt Road and Clark Street.
There is little love between Messrs. Rezko and Mahru.
In December 2005, after Rezmar’s breakup, Mr. Mahru began cooperating with federal investigators against Mr. Rezko, according to a document filed by Mr. Rezko in one of his two criminal cases. Mr. Mahru ultimately was not called as a witness in Mr. Rezko’s case.
Here's the
Obama connection according to the Chicago Sun-Times:
For more than five weeks during the brutal winter of 1997, tenants shivered without heat in a government-subsidized apartment building on Chicago's South Side.
It was just four years after the landlords -- Antoin "Tony'' Rezko and his partner Daniel Mahru -- had rehabbed the 31-unit building in Englewood with a loan from Chicago taxpayers.
Rezko and Mahru couldn't find money to get the heat back on.
But their company, Rezmar Corp., did come up with $1,000 to give to the political campaign fund of Barack Obama, the newly elected state senator whose district included the unheated building.
What does Barack Obama know about Mr.Mahru or should we say what has Mahru told the Feds about the $1000 that find its way to Barack Obama.No word yet from Alderman
Burke on those 62 Acres.
