Diocese of Rockville must disclose financials, committee says

By Sarah Lizee

Olympia, Wash., April 29 – The Roman Catholic Diocese of Rockville Centre, New York’s official committee of unsecured creditors is seeking a court order directing the diocese to produce electronically stored accounting information, according to a Tuesday filing with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York.

The committee said that in November it gave the debtor a list of information it needed to complete its analysis prior to beginning mediation.

In January, after discussions with the debtor, the committee highlighted six priority requests. The committee said that, to date, it has received only a handful of audited financial statements in partial response to just one of the financial requests.

“Due to this complete lack of information, the only fact the committee does know is that this diocese, in just four potentially avoidable transactions, transferred over $100 million of cash and property to affiliates,” the group said in its motion.

“And now, the diocese refuses to provide the committee access to other information to identify other avoidable transfers.”

The committee claims the diocese wants to control what information the committee sees, when it receives the information, and how it interprets that information.

“Apparently the diocese expects the committee to just accept what the diocese chooses to tell it,” the committee said.

“This asks for an extraordinary amount of trust from a constituency who are only creditors in this case because they and their families’ trusted the diocese once and that trust was brutally betrayed.

“After decades of obfuscation and cover-up, which has only continued during the pendency of this bankruptcy, survivors will not rely on the diocese’s disclosures with no means of verification.”

The Rockville Centre, N.Y.-based diocese filed bankruptcy on Oct. 1, 2020 under Chapter 11 case number 20-12345.

© 2015 Prospect News.
All content on this website is protected by copyright law in the U.S. and elsewhere. For the use of the person downloading only.
Redistribution and copying are prohibited by law without written permission in advance from Prospect News.
Redistribution or copying includes e-mailing, printing multiple copies or any other form of reproduction.