The Supreme Court of Bermuda has ordered that South Shore Holdings, owner and operator of Macau’s THE 13 Hotel, be wound up for failure to pay a HK$7 million (US$902,000) debt.
The order was issued this week after PYI Management Limited issued a winding up petition in June in relation to the debt, accrued via a term loan facility agreement. PYI Management is a wholly-owned subsidiary of PYI Corp Ltd, which co-owns Paul Y. Engineering Group Limited (PYE) alongside South Shore.
According to a filing on Tuesday, South Shore has now been ordered to be wound up with Ernst & Young Transactions Limited and Edward Whittaker of R&H Services Limited appointed as joint provisional liquidators of the company. No further details of the action against it were provided.
The winding up petition comes as South Shore faces legal action on multiple fronts closer to home, including a writ of summons recently issued in the High Court of Hong Kong which relates to a statutory demand the company received from a lender to make payment of HK$3.28 billion (US$423 million) in outstanding loans and interest. That summons also came with the threat of a winding up petition.
In June, South Shore applied to the Macau court for voluntary liquidation of its wholly-owned subsidiary New Concordia Hotel Limited, the sole beneficial owner of THE 13 Hotel.
The application could see New Concordia declared bankrupt and South Shore potentially delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange due to insufficient operations as required under listing rules.
The brainchild of long-departed Chairman Stephen Hung, THE 13 had been envisioned as an uber-luxury hotel with space for 66 VIP gaming tables aimed at capitalizing on Macau’s booming VIP segment of the early 2010s. Instead, a series of funding and construction delays saw the property open in September 2018 with no gaming and with a number of rooms unfinished – all at a cost of US$1.6 billion.