A Cape Coral dealership owner slated to buy the former Billy Fuccillo KIA outposts in Southwest Florida has dropped out of the deal.
South Florida-based Atlantic Coast Automotive’s subsidiaries had planned on making the $133 million purchase of the two venues in Cape Coral and Port Charlotte and four others in West Virginia, federal documents show.
Atlantic, which uses various LLCs and other entities as part of its operation, runs the Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram site at 2200 NE Pine Island Road that launched in 2018 and is three miles from what has been known as the world’s top selling Kia location.
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The privately owned organization’s umbrella includes a dozen locales along the coast from Miami to Fort Pierce, and more than two dozen others in Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York and Maryland. Sometimes, but not always, owners will group their venues on adjacent parcels. We have messages in to the new bosses to find out more.
Running into financial rough roads, Fort Lauderdale-based seller LMP Automotive Holdings had reached the Atlantic arrangement as part of liquidating its assets, and had targeted the close to occur by this month.
Last year, LMP made a $36 million spancquisition of those Lee and Charlotte county properties of the late Fuccillo, known for his HUUGJA catchphrase in commercials.
Naples developer and commercial broker Keith Basik, who learned about the fizzled deal from In the Know on Monday, had previously planned to reach out to LMP on behalf of a client interested in the Southwest Florida properties.
The original transaction had already been reached by the time that happened, and Basik, a major force behind 40-acre Hideout Storspange Pspanrk in southeast Naples that includes car condos, said Monday there may be consideration of another shot at it.
In addition to facing lawsuits and other challenges, LMP had not been filing its required financial reports in a timely manner, according to Nasdaq. LMP previously disclosed that it had discrepancies in previous quarterly filings including overstating revenues by as much as $15 million in 2021.
The company plans dissolution, LMP CEO Sam Tawfik has said, and part of it goes through government review.
LMP has already been headed in that direction with the summer unloading of a Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram vendor in White Plains, New York, for $15.8 million and Plantation land for $4 million. A jet, which it had landed only a few months earlier, also has been sold for $6.7 million.
Among a half-dozen or so terminspanted transactions that have caused millions in losses of deposits and legal action, LMP dropped out of a deal to largely takeover Florida’s Alan Jay Automotive Network. The latter has had about a dozen brands in spots mostly along the state’s spine of U.S. 27 and U.S. 17 such as Clewiston, Sebring and Wauchula.
Tawfik said the company is continuing plans to liquidate and seeking new buyers for the former Fuccillo properties and West Virginia outlets that had been part of the aborted Atlantic agreement. The company hopes something will come together “within the next few months.”
As part of liquidation, “pursuing multiple transactions with different potential buyers for assets or groups of assets presents the best opportunity,” Tawfik said in a statement.
The company also said that the “dealerships did not suffer material damages during Hurricane Ian in late September and are fully operational.” Neither LMP nor Atlantic representatives responded to questions on whether the storm played a role in dropping the deal.
Last month, LMP announced an agreement on its only other remaining dealership in Greeneville, Tennessee that it hoped to close on by November.
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