LSK’s Assya Unit Wins Payment Protection Bid at Luxembourg Court
Oct. 30 (Bloomberg) — Assya Asset Management Luxembourg SA, a unit of investment firm Leyne, Strauss-Kahn & Partners, won a request at a Luxembourg court to suspend debt repayments in a bid to get protection against creditors.
Assya Asset Management will be granted a suspension of payments that will end Nov. 17 at noon local time, the Luxembourg district court ruled today. The nation’s financial regulator will act as administrator with the role of managing the firm’s assets.
LSK & Partners, Assya Asset Management and Thierry Leyne were ordered on Oct. 3 by a Luxembourg judge to pay 2 million euros ($2.5 million) to the Luxembourg unit of Baloise Holding AG. The insurance company had sued the group over the repayment of shares in LSK & Partners.
The request for a payment suspension came a day after Thierry Leyne, a French-Israeli entrepreneur who started LSK & Partners with Dominique Strauss-Kahn last year, fell to his death in Tel Aviv on Oct. 23. Former International Monetary Fund managing director Strauss-Kahn, 65, gave up the chairmanship of LSK & Partners on Oct. 20, the firm said in a statement this week. Le Figaro newspaper reported that Leyne had committed suicide.
LSK & Partners shares were halted in Paris on Oct. 23, after declining 59 percent in 2014. Assya Asset Management’s request with a local court on Oct. 24 automatically — and in line with the local law — suspended all payments by the firm until a final ruling by the tribunal.
Hedge Fund
Strauss-Kahn bought a stake in Leyne’s investment-banking and asset-management company, Luxembourg-based Anatevka SA, last year as part of an effort to rebuild his post-IMF life after a scandal dashed his chance to run for the French presidency. LSK & Partners, as the bank is known, said in March it planned to use Strauss-Kahn’s economic and political knowledge to help start a $2 billion hedge fund.
Strauss-Kahn “desired to give a structure” to his consultant and advisory missions, Leyne said in a September 2013 interview with Bloomberg News.
Strauss-Kahn was charged in 2011 with criminal sex, attempted rape, sexual abuse, unlawful imprisonment and the forcible touching of a chambermaid at the Sofitel hotel in Manhattan. Strauss-Kahn denied the charges, which were later dropped. He settled the maid’s lawsuit in 2012.
A call seeking comment from an LSK & Partners official in Luxembourg wasn’t immediately returned.
–With assistance from Fabio Benedetti-Valentini in Paris and Aoife White in Brussels.
To contact the reporter on this story: Stephanie Bodoni in Luxembourg at sbodoni@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Anthony Aarons at aaarons@bloomberg.net Peter Chapman, Jones Hayden
