Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost has lined up two candidates to take over East Cleveland’s finances as the suburb’s court-appointed receiver.
The state is moving to make East Cleveland the first Ohio city taken into receivership under a new law. The city has spent 30 of the last 37 years in and out of fiscal emergency.
“Despite oversight mechanisms and periodic interventions, the city has failed to achieve the structural reforms necessary to restore fiscal stability,” attorneys for the law firm Ice Miller, which is handling the case for Yost, wrote in a legal filing with the Ohio Court of Claims.
One of the state’s receiver picks is Andrew Simon, a Cincinnati-based managing director of Oxford Restructuring Advisors. The other is George Shoup of Columbus, a senior managing director of Development Specialists, Inc.
Both companies specialize in corporate restructuring and bankruptcies, when companies sell assets and settle up with creditors.
Here are two examples of their work.
Shoup served as a court-appointed receiver in 2019 for a company that operated 43 Pizza Huts and 6 Checkers restaurants in the Philadelphia area. Oxford worked as financial advisor for the creditors of 4E, a maker of hand sanitizer that filed for bankruptcy in 2022.
Ohio’s Office of Budget and Management would cover the receiver’s fees. Shoup would charge $325 per hour with a monthly capped fee of $40,000, according to a court filing. Simon’s rate would be $595 per hour, capped at $60,000 per month.
The state filed the motion for receivership on Nov. 5, a day after voters elected Sandra Morgan to return to the East Cleveland mayor’s office.
