Morande Mazda is Bankrupt
In the venerable words of Stimpy, “Oh joy!” Because it seems the dealer we bought our Mazda6 from has gone bankrupt, according to the Naples Daily News.
The dealership, Morande Mazda, had actually been sued umpteen times for failure to pay debts dating as far back as 2003. Records even show that the namesake of the dealership, James Morande Jr., has been involved in civil suits with the county government since 1992, when he managed a pizza restaurant. The situation really came to a head this past November, when the dealership filed for Chapter 11. Apparently their service department is still operating, but I am not sure I would want to service my car there considering they have been sued by other dealers for failure to pay for parts they got from them.
A while back, AmSouth Bank loaned Morande $5 million to buy new vehicle inventory, but at some point Morande stopped paying back the debt, so AmSouth had all the money seized. Since this means Morande can’t pay people for their trade-ins (or basically anything else), this has left a lot of people in the lurch, behind on their new car payments but yet responsible for their old cars too since they technically still own them!
At this point, I’m just hoping that Morande will sell the Mazda arm of his dealership (as he has already done with the Kia arm) so that we can eventually have a trustworthy Mazda dealer around here. Right now, Morande’s the only Mazda dealer in town.
Categorized as Rants