The state has asked a Denver judge to decide whether the former owners of the world’s largest used-tire dump, in Hudson, should get more than $124,000 in recycle funds or if it should go to investors who foreclosed on the property.
The Colorado attorney general’s office filed the motion in Denver District Court on behalf of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, which pays companies that shred tires to come up with ideas or technologies that would use the resulting rubber crumbs.
The judge’s decision to accept the funds followed a Denver Post report about how the state continued to pay the operator of the tire dump, Magnum d’Or Resources, nearly $500,000 over 15 months despite federal investigations into allegations of securities fraud by company officials, a litany of shareholder lawsuits claiming the same, and a foreclosure case bearing down on them.
The state wants the judge handling the case — FGH Financial sued the state and Magnum over the money — to be the caretaker of nearly two months of recycle funds that were likely to be handed over to Magnum until FGH, the private investment firm that foreclosed on the 120-acre site in September, pointed out how Magnum was defaulting on millions of dollars in loans.
The funds are the August and September “reimbursements” Magnum had requested from the state’s processor and end-user fund, money that is intended to encourage companies to use emerging technologies for recycling the resulting shredded tire crumbs. The money comes from a $1.50 surcharge consumers pay for every new tire purchased in the state.
But Magnum wasn’t doing much with the tons of crumbs, dumping them instead into deep pits on its property where an estimated 60 million other tires already sit.
The judge agreed and the state health department was to hand over $124,670 for Magnum’s work in August and an undetermined amount for the September funds.
David Migoya: 303-954-1506, dmigoya@denverpost.com,
