Vehicle repossession enrollment was about $20. And that was a bit more than a week’s gas. We had a brief chat with the company. Then we bought a Honda Civic in 2003, and I drove that car for 11 years until it died in 2014. The dealer in which it was bought and serviced went out of business last year. Our second car was a Toyota, bought in 2006. We owned it until the summer of 2015, when the clutch went out and we traded it in. A Honda Accord replaced it. We purchased the Accord used, and this was the same year we stopped driving the Toyota. It’s been in storage, untouched, ever since. We went into the dealer and bought the Accord. We still have it. They got our $8 down payment. They were nice enough to allow me to leave it in my driveway for a week so I could see it from the street. I picked it up on Saturday, December 11, and got the title two days later. The salesman signed it for me. A year and a half later, we sold the Accord, leaving it on the lot for about six weeks. So why did we get it in the first place? Because I was in the market for a new car and my wife isn’t fond of driving. When I test drove the Accord in February 2017, I liked it a lot and decided to buy it. At some point, that dealership was probably in bankruptcy. The fact that it’s now in Chapter 7, instead of Chapter 11 or Chapter 13, probably means the dealership didn’t make enough sales in a year to pay all its bills. The dealership’s owner got to keep most of the dealership assets. In a sale, I might have had to pay the bankruptcy lawyer $2000 or more for doing absolutely nothing. The Chapter 7 trustee has hired a company to liquidate the dealership. The process is being run by a liquidation trustee. The trustee hires himself as the Chapter 7 trustee, his son as the general counsel, and various other family members as vice presidents. This creates a conflict of interest when the trustee decides that he wants to buy back the property he himself leased from the dealership. The trustee’s son does not believe his boss made the right decision on this case. He is a big believer in following the law. His father knows that he’s wrong, but he’s too close to retirement to fight it. The trustee’s son is the one who would have to testify if the case goes to trial. He will be watching. I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve seen how a lot of attorneys are compensated. Sometimes they get paid a percentage of the sale price or a percentage of the liquidation value. Sometimes they get a flat fee. A lot of times the best deal for the estate comes when the trustee makes a deal with a vendor of the business. The trustee can tell the vendor, “OK, you already knew you couldn’t sell this to anyone else. You sell it to me and I’ll pay you 80 percent of my recovery.” That’s a pretty good deal for the vendor, and it keeps the estate from getting too much better a deal than it would get on a public market. So here’s what happened: At the end of last year, a few weeks before I filed bankruptcy, the dealer filed a motion to sell the business. It needed $400,000 to pay off the bankruptcy loan. It was to get a note with seven years to pay back the loan. The note would pay $25,000 for the first year. Then the interest rate would go up $2 per month each year, with a max of $15,000 a year. That’s not bad. That’s $750 a month over the seven years. The dealer was asking for a court order to prevent any other potential buyers from bidding for the business. The judge granted the motion. The dealer hired a business broker who got a potential buyer willing to offer $350,000 for the dealership, cash. The purchaser had a letter from a local bank saying he’d be able to cover the first year of the note. That offer was later increased to $400,000. That’s when it was time for the trustee to bring the offer before the court, as he was required to do. But no matter how hard the trustee tried, he could not find the motion. It had disappeared from his office files, and he couldn’t find the file in the case files. He hired a lawyer who spent a month trying to find it, but it was nowhere to be found. He and the Chapter 7 trustee realized that the trustee’s son was probably the one who pulled the motion from the files. It’s a pretty safe bet. It’s in the dealer’s best interest to keep the buyer at bay until the bankruptcy is over. For some reason, the Chapter 7 trustee and his two associates think that he had a deal with the potential buyer to prevent him from bidding on the dealership. Whoever it was said that they did have a deal, and the buyer told him that he’d have to drop out of the deal if the trustee wouldn’t go along with the proposed deal. In reality, the buyer never had anything like that deal. He probably got a verbal promise that the trustee would not make a public announcement of the proposed deal until the deal was officially done. But he wasn’t buying a dealership. The trustee’s actions were a major problem for the dealer. In the middle of last year, the dealership had a deal to buy a competitor that was for all intents and purposes a going concern. The only reason it’s not a going concern now is the Chapter 7 trustee. If the trustee’s son was the one who got that dealership deal killed, then it’s likely that the trustee’s son killed it. There are reasons to suspect that he did so for his own benefit. The trustee asked the judge to grant him more time to sell the dealership. He wanted to give the buyer time to put the purchase together. That’s what I think went wrong. The trustee was going to get paid whatever deal he made with the buyer. But since the buyer wasn’t going to get the deal, the trustee was going to get his commission, and possibly another $200,000 for himself. The trustee tried to sell the dealership in the middle of January. That attempt failed. He filed a motion to sell the dealership in the middle of February. That sale also failed, and he filed a second motion to sell the business to the same buyer in June. This was the one that went through. It failed because there were conditions imposed by the judge that were not met. I don’t know how it failed. The motion and the order approving the sale don’t tell the whole story. The Chapter 7 trustee filed an amended disclosure statement on December 22, 2017, just a few days before I filed. At the time, it had been almost four years since I filed. I had a hearing in front of the judge in January 2018. The trustee filed a supplemental disclosure statement on February 26, 2018. At that time, the judge ordered me to file a final plan of liquidation within 30 days. I filed my final plan of liquidation on April 29, 2018. That plan was confirmed on July 10, 2018. In my opinion, the plan is too simple to execute. I would have proposed a sale of the assets, which would probably produce much better results than a liquidation. The Chapter 7 trustee and his two associates did not file a plan at all. They’re going to liquidate the assets, as the court has authorized. The trustee was appointed in 2013. I didn’t know that when I hired him. And after he was appointed, I did not retain him. He resigned in January 2015, as is his right to do so. The new trustee was appointed on July 31, 2017, as was the attorney of record. I was served with a summons and complaint in February 2018. The complaint and summons were served with a motion for summary judgment. I’m told that summary judgment is a legal decision, made without trial by a judge. It is the first of many steps in the process of filing a lawsuit. I filed an answer and counterclaim. That was also served with the summary judgment motion. It was never heard. When the trustee was appointed, I told him that the dealership business was not good enough to sell to anyone else. He assured me that he would do his best to sell the dealership. After I was served with the lawsuit, I paid him to find a buyer for the dealership. I believe I hired him for $2000 and made arrangements for him to get a discount on that. The same day he received his first payment, the trustee was in the offices of the attorney representing the dealership. He has worked for the dealership’s attorney for the past eight or nine years. The trustee and the attorney were there to give me some instructions about the case. They had no court appearance scheduled for that day, and they didn’t make any. I’m told that the dealership tried to sell to another dealer, but that deal fell apart. The trustee told me the dealership was a lot more valuable now than when he sold it in 2016, and he asked if