Restructuring & fiduciary advisory for complex situations
Appointed by courts and engaged by companies, boards, investors, and acquirers in distressed and contested proceedings — to run the process, to propose the solution, and to execute it.
Discuss a situationWhen Arbel Is Engaged
Overview
Arbel Capital Advisors LLC is an independent restructuring and fiduciary advisory firm operating across complex restructuring, distressed, and capital structure situations, with particular depth in real estate and in closely held, related-party ownership structures — family and affiliate entities whose cash flows, guarantees, and cross-collateralization are entangled and often undocumented.
The firm serves as chief restructuring officer, restructuring advisor, interim executive, independent director, court-appointed receiver, and litigation trust board member in matters involving leveraged portfolios, cross-border ownership structures, bondholder constituencies, and governance-sensitive environments.
Arbel is appointed by courts and engaged by companies, boards, investors, and acquirers across industries in situations requiring disciplined operational oversight, liquidity management, stakeholder coordination, and independent decision-making. The firm's work frequently arises in contested or multi-party environments where transparency, credibility, and structured process are critical to stabilizing operations and preserving value.
Core Capabilities
- Stabilization of distressed platforms and interim executive leadership
- Design and execution of restructuring strategies and strategic alternatives
- Cash management, liquidity oversight, and financial reporting controls
- Creditor, lender, and bondholder negotiations and stakeholder coordination
- Plan development and implementation in Chapter 11 proceedings
- Single asset real estate (SARE) cases across commercial and multifamily asset types
- Loan workout representation and lender negotiations
- Receiverships and court-supervised operational oversight
- Independent director and manager appointments
- Governance-sensitive engagements involving insider or cross-border complexities
- Investigation of insider transactions and affiliate cash flows
- Litigation trust board service overseeing creditor recovery efforts
- Closely held and related-party structures — mapping entities, cash flows, guarantees, and cross-collateralization
- Complex intercreditor and joint venture dynamics
- Coordination between foreign ownership and U.S.-based operations
- Multi-jurisdictional insolvency proceedings, including BVI, Israeli, and U.S. regimes
- Localized, accountable oversight where principals sit offshore
- Transparency enhancement and management forecast support
- Coordination with financial advisors and counsel for efficient case administration
- Timely, cost-sensitive resolutions in smaller Chapter 11 matters
- U.S.-side restructuring leadership for real estate issuers of TASE-listed bonds
- Managing the bond trustee relationship and bondholder meetings across multiple series
- Arrangement (hesder) negotiation spanning U.S. assets and Israeli public debt
- Interaction between BVI, Israeli, and U.S. insolvency regimes
- Buy-side advisory on asset acquisitions out of Chapter 11, from engagement through closing
- Diligence on the asset and on the estate around it
- Bid strategy and structuring
- Guidance for counterparties, landlords, vendors, and investors
- Navigating and negotiating claims, contract and plan treatment alongside counsel
Representative Matters
Selected engagements.
Case Studies
A mixed-use property carrying $80.3 million of matured mortgage debt. The lender moved to enforce through a UCC foreclosure that would have transferred the property beyond any court’s supervision within weeks. Two Chapter 11 filings stopped it, and the lender then litigated stay relief and dismissal across a summer of hearings.
Arbel was engaged nine days before the scheduled sale and served as chief restructuring officer, working toward a process both sides could accept. Within weeks the debtor and the lender jointly moved to retain a broker and filed jointly crafted bidding procedures. The case ran on consensual cash collateral from that point, and by December the lender was agreeing to increase the professional carve-out at Arbel’s request.
No qualified third-party bid emerged and the lender credit bid $57.5 million. The sale was then held open so the lender could keep marketing its credit bid to a third party, which it did, carrying the plan’s tax savings through to the end user. The sale closed in June 2025 under a confirmed plan that funded a $100,000 unsecured creditor fund foreclosure would have extinguished.
Eighty-two debtors. Ninety-three buildings. Roughly 5,200 apartments, overwhelmingly rent-stabilized, across four boroughs, against $564 million of mortgage debt on separate, uncross-collateralized loans. The engagement began as a loan workout. When those negotiations reached an impasse, the lender commenced foreclosure actions and moved for the appointment of a receiver. The Chapter 11 cases were filed in May 2025, with no cash on hand.
Operating 93 residential buildings from a standing start required consensual use of the lender’s cash collateral, and that was contested. Arbel delivered rent registration, disbursement and tenant records into a court-ordered production and stood behind the thirteen-week budget by declaration. Following the cash collateral hearing the estates moved forward on an agreed basis, with materially improved reporting and information flow, and a full marketing process ran to auction.
Confirmation was contested — the City of New York wrote to the court the night before, and the United States Trustee objected to the plan’s exculpation provisions. The order entered the following day. The portfolio sold for $450 million and the plan went effective ten months after filing.
Appointed after a five-day evidentiary hearing over the judgment debtors’ interests in a student housing platform, following a judgment in excess of $57 million and a finding of civil contempt for transfers made in violation of restraining notices.
The receivership took custody of the business interests, traced intercompany transfers among affiliated entities, and moved to compel and for contempt where compliance failed. The matter did not end in a judgment. It ended in a multi-party resolution Arbel structured — one that reached parties never before the court, which is why it was sealed.
The settlement and the receiver’s final accounting were approved as fair and reasonable.
A British Virgin Islands issuer holding interests in more than 125 Brooklyn buildings against $1.3 billion of funded debt, including approximately $750 million of bonds listed on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. Ownership ran through layered offshore entities, and the restructuring ran simultaneously through Chapter 11 in New York, provisional liquidation in the BVI, and recognition proceedings in Israel.
Arbel ran property operations and cash management, investigated financial irregularities, resolved partnership disputes, settled a contested equity claim over a Williamsburg building for $4.7 million, and negotiated with the directors’ and officers’ insurers. Arbel also ran the sale process for the Denizen — 911 units in Bushwick — which sold for $506 million. Separately, bondholders filed an involuntary petition against the fee owner of the William Vale; after a contested evidentiary hearing the court entered an order for relief, and that asset later sold for $177 million, with every creditor paid in full.
The Chapter 11 plan transferred All Year’s equity interests in property-owning entities to new ownership. After disputes with the buyer, the plan was confirmed January 31, 2023.
A client set out to acquire a single property out of a Chapter 11 case in which twenty-seven were being sold. Arbel ran the diligence on the asset and on the estate around it, and positioned the client as the stalking horse bidder. The client was outbid. Arbel pivoted to a second asset in the same process, re-ran the diligence and the bid, and won it.
Circumstances then changed, and the client elected not to become the ultimate owner. Arbel structured a back-to-back transaction, with the client’s rights assigned so the property landed with its ultimate owner at closing.
The court approved the sale and it closed in 2026. The client was awarded its break-up fee and expense reimbursement on the first asset, and the second moved into new ownership.
Approach
Every distressed matter has more sides to it than it first appears. The work is understanding each of them well enough to see where a resolution actually lies, and then getting the parties there. That is the same job whether Arbel sits as chief restructuring officer, as a court-appointed fiduciary, or as advisor to a buyer or to a party drawn into someone else’s case.
It requires being two things at once: an advocate for the client or the estate, and a broker the other side can afford to believe.
What that looks like depends on the seat: sometimes alongside management, sometimes in place of it. Where ownership is closely held and entangled, Arbel works from the inside, with the people who built the structure and can explain it. Where Arbel replaces the principal, it takes control first and then rebuilds the relationships the business needs to keep running.
It does not always hold. Where cooperation fails, or the facts require it, Arbel takes hard positions and litigates them. But the premise of the practice is that most matters resolve faster through a negotiated path than a litigated one, and that the professional who can hold the confidence of all sides is usually the one who finds it. The objective is resolution, not victory.
Principal-led, not leveraged. Engagements are run by the principal rather than staffed down — fewer layers, faster decisions, and a fee load proportionate to the estate.
Collaborative by design. Arbel works alongside restructuring counsel, financial advisors, brokers, and other professionals — coordinating process and aligning objectives while enabling each professional team to operate effectively within its defined role.
Leadership
- J.D., New York University School of Law
- B.S. Finance, summa cum laude, Touro College
- Part 36 Certified Receiver
- New York State & Federal Courts
- Supreme Court of the United States
- American Bankruptcy Institute
- NYC Bar — Bankruptcy Committee
Ephraim Diamond is a Chief Restructuring Officer and restructuring advisor with twenty-five years of experience in complex restructuring, distressed capital structures, and litigation-driven recoveries across real estate, renewable energy, healthcare, consumer, media, and other industries.
Mr. Diamond regularly serves as chief restructuring officer, restructuring advisor, receiver, plan administrator, independent director, and board member of post-confirmation litigation trusts pursuing creditor recoveries. He is engaged by debtors, secured and unsecured creditors, investors, and acquirers, and appointed by courts, in high-stakes Chapter 11, cross-border insolvency, and distressed asset matters, including U.S. real estate platforms financed through the Israeli public bond market.
He previously practiced bankruptcy law at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and served as a senior legal strategist and Director at Davidson Kempner Capital Management, where he was the founding legal analyst for distressed strategies across asset classes and provided strategic legal support to more than fifty investment professionals.
Mr. Diamond founded Arbel Capital Advisors in 2018. He is a Part 36 Certified Receiver and is admitted to practice in New York state and federal courts and before the Supreme Court of the United States.
About the Name
Arbel Capital Advisors takes its name from Mount Arbel — a cliff fortress rising above the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel. Its sheer 300-foot face commands the approaches to the valley below, and the caves cut into that face have served as refuge and strongpoint since antiquity: fighters held them against Herod’s forces in the first century BCE, and Josephus later counted them among the strongholds he fortified in the Galilee during the First Jewish–Roman War.
What the mountain is known for is not conquest. It is holding a position — keeping independence and credibility under pressure, on difficult ground, against significant opposition.
That is the work.
Ready to discuss your situation?
Arbel engages across a range of restructuring and fiduciary contexts. Inquiries are welcome from counsel, lenders, boards, bondholder representatives, and courts.