11 August 2026

On Sunday 9 August 2026, in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Texas, an entity called Signal National LLC filed for Chapter 11 protection alongside a group of affiliated debtors (Case No. 26-90190). The name will mean nothing to most readers. The history behind it will mean a great deal.

The Debtors’ operating history belongs to two entities: 777 Partners LLC, formed by Joshua Wander and Steven Pasko in 2015, and 600 Partners LLC, the affiliated holding company Pasko formed in 2017. This filing is the formal, court-supervised burial of the enterprise that, between September 2023 and May 2024, came within a Premier League deadline of owning Everton Football Club.

For those less familiar with this saga, there is a dedicated page on this site collecting the multiple reports, analyses and podcasts published here since November 2023, Everton & 777 Partners, together with last month’s full litigation recap, The Analysis Series: A recap on the status of Josh Wander, 777 Partners et al.

Chapter 11, briefly, for UK readers

The US Bankruptcy Code is organised into chapters. Chapter 7 is liquidation, a trustee displaces management and sells the assets, the closest analogue to compulsory liquidation here. Chapter 11 is nominally “reorganisation”: existing management stays in control as a “debtor in possession”, operating under court supervision while negotiating with creditors. In practice Chapter 11 is also routinely used, as here, for an orderly wind-down where the estate is too complex and too litigious for a simple liquidation.

Filing triggers an automatic stay halting most litigation against the debtor, useful when your estate faces SEC enforcement, a disputed $609 million guaranty claim and a queue of angry lenders. The petition is accompanied by a First Day Declaration, a sworn statement by an officer explaining the business and the causes of its failure. The case is funded by “DIP” (debtor-in-possession) financing ranking ahead of existing debt, and typically concludes with a court-confirmed plan, in a wind-down, longer-dated assets pass to a liquidating trust which monetises them over years for creditors. The nearest domestic comparison is an administration with a wind-down rather than rescue purpose, but with the estate’s own management, not an external officeholder, in the driving seat.

The state of the estate

The numbers, as reported in the filing alert published by Bondoro Insights on 10 August, are worthy of note. An enterprise that at its 2023 peak reported more than $10 billion of invested assets, and whose organisational chart spanned more than 500 legal entities, now employs 15 people, all remote, and has been run since 2024 by restructuring advisers GlassRatner from Dallas.

Against that sit at least $2.71 billion of prepetition funded debt across twelve facilities.

Where that debt sits matters as much as its size. Approximately $1.49 billion is owed by the Debtor entities themselves, dominated by the ACAP Holdco Facility at approximately $1.259 billion including interest, matured November 2024, in default ever since. A further $1.22 billion sits at non-Debtor special-purpose borrowers, chiefly a $1.19 billion Knightsbridge facility guaranteed by both parents. And outside the reported total altogether sits Leadenhall Capital Partners’ asserted guaranty claim of approximately $609 million, which the Debtors dispute.

Regular readers will recognise the shape of this immediately. The dominance of the A-CAP exposure is precisely what was set out on these pages in June and July 2024: A-CAP, not 777, had become the economic party in interest across the platform, including in the circa £200 million of junior-ranked working capital that flowed to Everton during the takeover period, much of it ultimately funded by A-CAP through 777’s Nutmeg vehicle.

The admission that matters

First Day Declarations are the estate’s own narrative, made under oath by its officers, here Chief Operating Officer Mark Shapiro of the successor management, not by Wander or Pasko. Which is what makes two of its concessions so significant.

First, on collateral. The Declaration acknowledges that issues emerged concerning the ownership, eligibility, valuation and allocation of receivables backing certain specialty-finance facilities, including instances in which the same assets were reported as collateral under more than one facility, and that the Debtors’ own forensic work dates those issues to before the May 2024 management transition. That is, in substance, the double-pledging conduct Leadenhall alleged in May 2024 and the federal indictment alleges from October 2025, now acknowledged as historical fact in the estate’s account of itself.

Culpability, of course, remains a matter for the criminal court.

Secondly, and remarkably, on Everton. The Declaration’s causation narrative records that, combined with tightening credit and mounting creditor concerns, the “adverse publicity surrounding Wander and the Company’s never-completed bid” for Everton contributed to a sharp contraction in access to outside capital by late 2023, leaving the Company unable to fund expansion or, before long, ordinary operations without lender forbearance.

Read that again. The estate of 777 Partners now formally identifies the scrutiny generated around the Everton bid as a proximate cause of the funding collapse that ended the enterprise.

The bid that was meant to crown the multi-club project instead accelerated its exposure. The unsuitability case made repeatedly on these pages from November 2023, no audited accounts for over two years, a group funded off the balance sheet of a Bermuda reinsurer, an inability to meet Everton’s monthly funding requirements, is no longer contested even by the successor management of 777’s own estate. The only decision-maker who could not see it, or would not see it, was Farhad Moshiri, given his desperation to sell the club.

Wander, Pasko, and two new dates

The filing alert also supplies two updates to last month’s recap, both of which I had flagged as requiring PACER verification. A superseding indictment was filed against Wander on 30 June 2026, and his criminal trial in the Southern District of New York is now set for 19 October 2026, ten weeks away. Wander denies wrongdoing, is contesting both the criminal indictment and the SEC’s civil complaint, and is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.

Pasko’s position is materially different, as covered previously: he resolved the SEC’s civil claims by consent judgment on 1 April 2026 on a neither-admit-nor-deny basis, faces no criminal charge on any source I have reviewed, and, a point that has received little press attention, was the sole founder of 600 Partners, the second leg of the guaranty web now entangling the estate. Former CFO Damien Alfalla pleaded guilty in October 2025 and is cooperating.

Three things to watch

777 Partners LLC itself is not, on the information available, among the entities that filed in Texas. On 16 July 2026, three credit funds (Vida), holding a $26 million judgment under a 2020 margin loan, filed an involuntary Chapter 7 petition against 777 Partners in Florida. The Debtors say they will seek to convert that case to Chapter 11 and transfer it to Texas, and expect additional entities to file within 60 days. Expect this to be widely misreported.

The Leadenhall fight outlives the company. In May 2025 Leadenhall foreclosed on receivables portfolios the Debtors say it had itself valued at more than $170 million, acquiring them for nominal $1 credit bids. The Debtors contend the sales were engineered to inflate Leadenhall’s deficiency claim and are litigating to establish they owe nothing; in March 2026 the Second Circuit vacated the injunction restraining the guarantors’ assets. Both things can be true: Leadenhall can have been right about the fraud perpetrated against it, and aggressive in its recovery tactics since. Those claims now pass to the liquidating trust, so this will run for years.

The football portfolio’s epitaph. Before the filing, the international football club interests were disposed of through a secured-creditor process satisfying $157 million of debt, not raising cash, retiring debt. A multi-club portfolio assembled for hundreds of millions ultimately swept to creditors for a fraction of the group’s borrowings. Anyone still arguing that multi-club structures are inherently value-creating for the clubs within them should be directed to this number.

And Everton?

Nothing in the filing names Everton FC, Farhad Moshiri or the Friedkin Group as a party, target or claimant, and the Friedkin bridge financing from the 777 period was repaid on completion of their acquisition. The position set out in last month’s recap stands: the Everton connection is contextual and reputational, not a live legal exposure. The club’s escape in May 2024, by deadline lapse rather than regulatory rejection, it should always be remembered, was the narrow avoidance of entanglement in precisely this insolvency.

One residual watch-item, and I want to be precise about its scope before anyone else is imprecise about it for me.

The proposed liquidating trust will, as is standard, hold the estate’s avoidance actions, the power under US bankruptcy law to review and, in defined circumstances, unwind certain transfers made before the filing. The 777-era working-capital loans to Everton were, as covered here at the time, repaid or absorbed within the A-CAP relationship. If the trust were ever to examine those historic flows, the counterparty to any such question would be A-CAP and the lending chain, not Everton, and not its current ownership. No source reviewed for this article identifies the club, Moshiri or the Friedkins as a party or target of any avoidance claim, and I am aware of no basis to expect one. I flag it only because a complete diligence picture requires reading the trust’s claims inventory when the plan and disclosure statement are filed, and I will do exactly that, and report back.

To be unambiguous: this is a housekeeping note on documents yet to be published, not a suggestion of exposure for Everton Football Club.

For the Independent Football Regulator, for owners’ and directors’ testing, and for the ongoing debate about private credit and insurance capital in football that I have been examining in the private markets series, this filing is now the definitive case study. I will return to it when the underlying court documents, schedules and plan are available.

This article is prepared from the Chapter 11 filing alert published by Bondoro Insights (10 August 2026), summarising the petition and First Day Declaration; the underlying court documents have not yet been independently reviewed and should be obtained via PACER before any figure is relied upon for formal purposes. All allegations against the individuals named remain allegations unless otherwise stated; nobody referenced has been convicted of any offence, and Mr Wander denies wrongdoing. This article does not constitute legal or investment advice.