Richard Neu’s General Ore International Corp has been able to successfully complete a legally contentious $50m borrowing needed to maintain its liquidity, new court filings indicate.

Secretive General Ore clinched the financing last year using Neu’s own resources, according to papers filed this month in a legal dispute between the shipowner and his daughter Amy in a US federal court.

As TradeWinds reported in January, the father and daughter are locked in a bitter clash in US District Court in New Jersey in which she seeks to have him removed as administrator of the family trusts behind General Ore.

Among her charges is that General Ore was brought to its knees by losses of $150m purportedly stemming from her father’s risky option trading in the stock market.

General Ore denied these and other allegations to TradeWinds at the time through former Teekay chief executive Peter Evensen, who has taken a key leadership role in the company at Neu’s request.

Richard Neu further alleges in his own court complaint that his daughter mishandled funds, causing him to fire her as head of the family’s real estate interests.

The legal claims and counterclaims had gone quiet for months as the two sides navigated the legal discovery process, but picked up again with the recent filings.

Richard Neu is now seeking to ease restrictions on funds that had been encumbered pending resolution of the dispute so that they might be directed toward use in his real estate activities.

Since the funds originally were restricted in relation to the dispute over General Ore’s attempts to refinance, they ought to be freed now that the financing has been accomplished, Richard’s lawyers argued.

“In June 2017, the disagreement concerning General Ore’s $50m financing was resolved when Richard used $5 million of his own funds and…personally borrowed $5m secured by assets of Neu Holdings to fund the $10m equity contribution necessary to secure General Ore’s supplemental $50m financing,” says a brief filed by Richard Neu counsel Ronald Davison, partner in New Jersey law firm Starr, Gern, Davison & Rubin.

TradeWinds previously reported General Ore’s attempts to secure the DNB financing based on earlier court filings, but the outcome of its efforts had been unclear.

The General Ore International Corp fleet is listed by VesselsValue as being under the ownership of Neu Seeschiffahrt, the Hamburg-based company created when Neu purchased the bulker fleet of German steelmaker ThyssenKrupp in 2001.

The fleet of 15 vessels includes nine capesize or VLOC units and six large gas carriers ranging from 60,000 cbm to 82,000 cbm. The average age of both vessel classes is nine years and the overall fleet is valued at $615m.

In a claim filed on 1 June last year, Amy Neu described General Ore as “functionally bankrupt”.

DNB forecast General Ore would have “insufficient liquidity” from the third quarter of 2017 and would run out of cash in early 2018 if freight markets continued as projected and nothing was done to address the situation, according to court documents.