The Palm Beach mansion once owned by Jeffrey Prosser, former owner and CEO of Innovative Telephone, has a tentative buyer who will pay $7.95 million for it, provided the buyer can inspect it.
And there’s the rub. While the purchaser (whose name was not released) is willing to pay that price, that person (or entity) understandably would like to inspect it. The Prossers, who have lived in the property rent- and tax-free for at least two years, won’t let the inspection happen, and the issue is before the U.S. Bankruptcy Court.
If the inspection is not completed quickly, the buyer has an opportunity to withdraw the offer without penalty.
It’s just the latest skirmish in a bankruptcy proceeding that has now taken longer than it took the United States to win World War II.
Meanwhile, in another similar battle, the Chapter 7 Trustee, James P. Carroll, has filed another motion before the court seeking to inspect that part of the Prossers’ collection of expensive wines that are in the wine room of the Palm Beach mansion. The rest of the collection is scattered in other locations.
Carroll’s attorneys have told the court, in that connection:
“. . . Based upon Dawn Prosser’s refusal to grant the Chapter 7 Trustee’s counsel and photographer access to the Wine Room [on July 28], the Chapter 7 Trustee believes that the Debtor [Jeffrey Prosser] or Dawn Prosser [his wife] may have removed, tampered with, consumed and/or destroyed some of the Wines previously located in the Wine Room at the Palm Beach Property . . . ” [capitalization in the original]
Just who owns the wines—Dawn Prosser, her husband, or her husband’s former corporation—is another aspect to the court battle, and the court has ordered that the wine not be drunk until the controversy is settled.
The Prossers’ position on both the wines and the mansion is that the ownership has not been settled, so there should be no forward movement on the sales of either.
While the Prossers continue to control both the Florida mansion and the partially constructed one on St. Croix, most of the rest of the Prosser property has long since been sold by court order—the private jet, the fleet of luxury cars, the summer place in Lake Placid, N.Y., the newspaper, the phone company and all the other corporations—with the proceeds going to pay a fraction of Jeffrey Prosser’s debts to his creditors.
But it has taken a long time. Prosser’s creditors filed to place him in involuntary bankruptcy on Feb. 10, 2006, and he filed for voluntary bankruptcy July 31 of that year.
