Billings v. Richards Woodbury Mortg. Corp. (In re Granada, Inc.)
UNPUBLISHED
See also 345.pdf
Chapter 11 trustee filed an adversary proceeding, seeking to avoid certain prepetition payments by debtor to a secured creditor as preferences under 11 U.S.C. § 547(b). The court considered whether the transfers in question satisfied the requirements of § 547(b)(5), which requires a determination of whether the creditor obtained more from the payments it received than it would have received from a liquidation. The court considered it "generally settled" that payments to a fully secured creditor will not meet the § 547(b)(5) standard, since each payment to a fully secured creditor proportionately reduces the secured debt, and thereby does not diminish the estate. Since the creditor that had received the targeted payments had been oversecured, the court concluded that the payments had not been preferential under § 547(b). Trustee's argument that security for the debt should be valued based solely on the debtor's own interest in it, which would render creditor under-secured, was rejected by the court, noting that creditor would have the ability to foreclose on the entire property in a liquidation, not just on the part of it that was owned by debtor.