CSDS Asset Management is no stranger to the courtroom.
The airplane-flipping company has spent over a decade in and out of litigation. For a firm that is often accused of entering agreements before securing an end buyer — or even the cash to close — legal trouble is sometimes the cost of doing business.
This time, trouble has touched down in the form of 20 bright-yellow Spirit Airlines jets.
As Spirit worked through its second Chapter 11 bankruptcy, it reached a deal in February to sell a group of planes to CSDS for $533m. But the sale unraveled after CSDS missed deadline after deadline, according to Spirit's legal team, which filed a lawsuit last month to recover damages.
In the complaint, Spirit’s attorneys from Davis Polk and Debevoise & Plimpton wrote that CSDS “acted in the worst of faith, repeatedly making false assurances of performance.”
To industry insiders, CSDS’ conduct wasn’t surprising: “Everybody I know has had issues with him,” one senior aviation trader said, referring to CSDS’ president, Benedict ‘Ben’ Sirimanne. “Everybody in our world knew this was going to happen.”
It isn’t difficult to find supporting evidence for the trader’s claim. Docket searches reveal a long history of...
