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Steward Health Care, the private operator of hospitals that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May, sued its landlord, Medical Properties Trust (NYSE:MPW) earlier this week, alleging that the medical REIT is thwarting the sales of Steward’s hospitals, according to a media report.
Medical Properties (MPW), also called MPT, claims that its real estate is much more valuable than Steward’s hospital business, and that has prevented Steward from selling the hospitals, Steward alleged in a complaint filed in a bankruptcy court, Reuters reported.
Steward asked U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez to determine how proceeds from future hospital sales should be distributed between the real estate and the hospital operations, the article said, citing the lawsuit.
An MPT spokesman told Reuters that it’s working with potential buyers and is trying to keep Steward’s hospitals open. He said that Steward is wrongly blaming MPT (MPW) for interfering in the sales process, when instead Steward has “refused to sell hospitals in order to extract value from MPT.”
Steward has been trying to deal with its $9B of debt by selling all its 31 hospitals, but said MPT has impeded those efforts to transfer the hospitals to new owners.
The hospital operator contends that MPT won’t sell its real estate to the new hospital operators on reasonable terms or enter into new leases with the buyers. “The disputes have prevented otherwise viable sales from proceeding,” Steward said, according to the Reuters report.
MPT (MPW) stock has dropped 7.9% in the past week and 33% in the past year.
