WSJ – Tucked away in a river bend behind a curtain of redwood trees, Scotia is an old-fashioned company town with a contemporary twist: The company that owns the town is a New York hedge fund.
Marathon Asset Management, with roughly $11 billion under management, never wanted to be in the business of replacing broken toilets and evicting the occasional marijuana grower. But in 2008, a bankruptcy court awarded ownership of Scotia, including its 272 homes, two churches, a hotel and several commercial buildings, to Marathon, which was a big creditor of the timber company that previously owned the town. Now, Marathon faces the prospect of spending another five years or more unloading this most illiquid of investments.
