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SD Investments

May 03, 2023, 14:30 ET

SD Investments Announces Acquisition of Great St. James and Little St. James Islands in the United States Virgin Islands

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sd-investments-announces-acquisition-of-great-st-james-and-little-st-james-islands-in-the-united-states-virgin-islands-301815032.html

ST. THOMAS, U.S. Virgin Islands, May 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ – SD Investments LLC, an investment firm led by renowned entrepreneur and investor Stephen Deckoff, today announced the acquisition of Great St. James and Little St. James islands (the "islands") in the United States Virgin Islands. Mr. Deckoff plans to develop a state-of-the-art, five-star, world-class luxury 25-room resort that will help bolster tourism, create jobs, and spur economic development in the region, while respecting and preserving the important environment of the islands.

As the Founder and Managing Principal of Black Diamond Capital Management, Mr. Deckoff has built a successful career crafting and executing plans to turn distressed situations into successful enterprises, across numerous companies and industries. As a resident of the U.S. Virgin Islands since 2011, he has supported the area's economic development, particularly after back-to-back hurricanes in 2017 shuttered several of the territories' resorts and businesses. "I've been proud to call the U.S. Virgin Islands home for more than a decade and am tremendously pleased to be able to bring the area a world-class destination befitting its natural grace and beauty," Mr. Deckoff said. "There is simply no place in the world as special as the U.S. Virgin Islands and I am humbled by the opportunity to share its splendor with visitors in a manner that will provide economic benefits to the region while respecting its culture, history and natural beauty. I very much look forward to working with the U.S. Virgin Islands to make this dream a reality."

Mr. Deckoff is in the process of retaining architects and engineers to develop the resort on the islands, which is anticipated to open in 2025. The islands were formerly owned by the late Jeffrey Epstein. A significant portion of the sale proceeds are being paid to the Government of the U.S. Virgin Islands under a previously announced settlement agreement between the government and Mr. Epstein's estate.

About SD Investments

SD Investments LLC. is an investment firm founded by Stephen Deckoff, Founder and Managing Principal of Black Diamond Capital Management.

For media inquiries and further information, please contact:

FTI Consulting

Tom Becker & Parveen Singh

tom.becker@fticonsulting.com & parveen.singh@fticonsulting.com

SOURCE SD Investments

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Liberal SCOTUS Justice Took $3M From Book Publisher, Didn’t Recuse From Its Cases

Random House was her main source of earned income, but she voted on key decision where publisher stood to lose money.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/liberal-scotus-justice-took-3m-from-book-publisher-didnt-recuse-from-its-cases

Liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor declined to recuse herself from multiple copyright infringement cases involving book publisher Penguin Random House despite having been paid millions by the firm for her books, making it by far her largest source of income, records show. In 2010, she got a $1.2 million book advance from Knopf Doubleday Group, a part of the conglomerate. In 2012, she reported receiving two advance payments from the publisher totaling $1.9 million. In 2013, Sotomayor voted in a decision for whether the court should hear a case against the publisher called Aaron Greenspan v. Random House. Greenspan was a Harvard classmate of Mark Zuckerberg’s who wrote a book about the founding of Facebook and contended that Random House rejected his book proposal and then awarded a deal to another author who copied his book and eventually turned it into the movie The Social Network. In 2017, Sotomayor began receiving payments each year from Penguin Random House itself, which continued annually through at least 2021, the most recent disclosure available, and totaled more than $500,000. In all, she received $3.6 million from Penguin Random House or its subsidiaries, according to a Daily Wire tally of financial disclosures.

In October 2019, children’s author Jennie Nicassio petitioned the Supreme Court to hear her lawsuit against Penguin Random House alleging that the book publisher had copied her book by selling one that was nearly identical. On the same day that the petition was distributed to the justices, Sotomayor received a $10,586 check from the publisher. On February 24, 2020, the Supreme Court voted not to hear the case, denying the “writ of certiorari” and meaning that the case would remain where it left off — with a circuit court having found in the publisher’s favor. Sotomayor’s next check, coming in May of that year, was her largest ever from the parent company, at $82,807. The Supreme Court does not reveal how individual justices vote when it comes to “cert,” but it does note when they recuse, which Sotomayor did not.

Fellow then-justice Stephen Breyer, by contrast, did recuse from the 2013 and 2020 Penguin cases. His wife is related to the family that founded a company, Pearson, which owned a stake in the publisher, and the couple held stock in Pearson: $1 million to $5 million in 2013, shrinking to $100,000 to $250,000 by 2020. Breyer also wrote books for the publisher, though he earned a much smaller amount than Sotomayor.

Sotomayor’s Penguin Random House money dwarfed the pay that she received from the court and made up all of her reported outside earned income, with the exception of $6,000 in payments from groups — some of which related to her book — and a $5,000 “option fee,” which typically relates to books, according to the disclosures. The publisher also footed the bill for her to speak to various groups. Breyer, by contrast, would typically have those groups foot the bill. Lawyers for Nicassio made a compelling argument that her case was worthy of being taken up by the Supreme Court. Nicassio wrote a book called “Rocky” which “tells the story of a little evergreen tree named Rocky who dreams of becoming the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree and embarks on an adventure toward that goal” against all adversity, getting advice from a mentor and facing attack by other plants, they wrote. Penguin Random House then published a book called “Albert” in which all of the same occurs, with the name of the Christmas tree changed. The lawyers said “Albert” even lifted key pieces of language from “Rocky,” and that the publisher had legally conceded that the work was copied.

The lawyers said that the Third Circuit found against Nicassio anyway because of a rule used in a handful of circuits in which a work is not considered wrongfully copied if similar elements would “naturally flow” from a “simplified version of the original plot.” In other words, taking for granted that there is a puny evergreen that wants to become the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, it would not be surprising that multiple authors would each imagine the tree facing adversity — setting aside the obvious similarities of the premise itself.