New Times Broward-Palm Beach
Rich Abdill investigated Sun-Sentinel Editor Howard Saltz’s multimillion-dollar bankruptcy and says Saltz told him two untruths while he was reporting the story.
Abdill writes that Saltz told him “someone else managed” rental properties that he’d lost to foreclosure or repossession. Abdill found otherwise:
But Octavi Semonin, who moved into a three-bedroom home owned by Saltz in 2009, tells a different story. It was to Saltz, he says, that he and his roommates sent the rent. And they called him when the washing machine broke. “He was our landlord for about two years… He essentially stopped paying his mortgage and went into foreclosure,” Semonin says. “I’ll be honest — I don’t have strongly positive feelings about Howard.”
Saltz also told Abdill that the bankruptcy was “a business bankruptcy, not a personal bankruptcy.”
Miami bankruptcy lawyer Timothy Kingcade, who reviewed the documents obtained by New Times, says that wasn’t true. “It is a personal bankruptcy,” he says. “The character of the debt doesn’t change the fact that it’s a personal bankruptcy.”
Abdill published a list of questions he says Saltz didn’t answer as he was reporting the story — among them, why Saltz’s wife used the Sun-Sentinel’s address for her bankruptcy filing.
