Two Courts, One Company, and 87 Dolphins on the Block

A Mexican aquarium operator's former CEO is issuing press releases claiming he still runs the company. The company's current management says those press releases are unauthorized. And both sides are telling different stories about what a Mexican court ruled last month.

This is happening while a Delaware bankruptcy court oversees the sale of 87 dolphins, six sea lions, and eight manatees to a rival theme park operator.

That was weird. But the real story isn't about who's lying - it's about which judge gets to decide what happens to the remaining assets of a company that straddles two countries, two insolvency systems, and a pair of competing management teams.

The Dolphin Company - a Cancún-based operator of marine parks across Latin America, the Caribbean, and the US - filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware on March 31, 2025. The lenders, represented by a Mexican bank called CiBanco, removed the founder and longtime CEO, Eduardo Albor. The Delaware court installed an independent director, Steven Strom, and a chief restructuring officer, Robert Wagstaff, who have been selling off US properties for the last year.

The Miami Seaquarium lease went to a developer for $22.5 million. Gulf World Marine Park sold for $4.5 million. Marineland was acquired by an outside group. The US side of the portfolio is mostly liquidated.

What remains is the crown jewel: the Mexican parks in Cozumel, Isla Mujeres, and the Riviera Maya. And those are the ones being sold right now.

On July 24, current management filed a motion asking Judge Laurie Selber Silverstein in Delaware to approve a $20 million sale of the Mexican assets to Delphinus Blue Planet, a subsidiary of Grupo Xcaret. Grupo Xcaret is one of the largest tourism operators in the Yucatán Peninsula and, by the former management's accounting, already controls more than 90% of dolphin habitats in Mexico once this deal closes.

Three days later, Albor's camp issued a press release saying the deal violates a Mexican Supreme Court ruling, creates a monopoly, and should be blocked. Current management responded with its own press release saying Albor is unauthorized to speak for the company, that no Mexican court has reversed the leadership change, and that the sale process is proceeding under US court supervision.

Then Albor issued a second press release. Then current management issued a second response.

The headline framing makes this sound like a governance fight - who controls the board, who authorized the statement, who was removed and why. That's part of it. But the mechanism that actually determines the outcome is simpler and more technical: which jurisdiction has authority over these assets.

Here's how the game works.

In Chapter 11, the US bankruptcy court has authority over the debtor's estate. The court-appointed management can sell assets with court approval. Creditors get paid from the proceeds. That's the normal playbook.

But Albor's camp is arguing that a Mexican insolvency proceeding - called a Concurso Mercantil (the Mexican equivalent of reorganization) - is also active, and that a June 30 ruling by the Mexican Supreme Court declared Albor's removal "absolutely null" and confirmed the Mexican proceeding. If that's true, it means a Mexican judge controls asset dispositions and the US sale motion could be legally moot.

Current management says the opposite: no Mexican insolvency proceeding exists. No Mexican court reversed the leadership change. Albor is actually the subject of criminal proceedings in Mexico (he was arrested in February for allegedly misleading a Mexican court) and is under precautionary measures from a Mexico City civil court that explicitly bar him from representing the company.

So we have the situation where both sides are pointing to Mexican court documents to support diametrically opposed claims about whether a Mexican insolvency exists. One side says the Supreme Court ruled in their favor. The other side says no ruling like that exists.

The person who gets paid doesn't care about which version is right. The person who gets paid cares about which judge signs the order.

That's the basic point. This isn't a dispute about animal welfare, antitrust, or corporate governance - at least, not primarily. It's a dispute about which court's docket controls the sale. The other claims are the arguments each side brings to that fight.

There's a funnier wrinkle inside the structure.

CiBanco - the Mexican bank acting as collateral agent and trustee for the lenders (Prudential Financial, Cigna, and Sculptor Equity Management) who orchestrated Albor's removal - is currently being liquidated by Mexican authorities at the request of the US Treasury's FinCEN. The bank was sanctioned in June 2025 under the FEND Act for facilitating money laundering tied to drug cartels.

So the institution that was supposed to represent the creditors' interests in this restructuring is itself in dissolution proceedings. That doesn't invalidate the lenders' ownership of the debt. But it makes the credibility of any argument coming through that channel worth a pause.

Steven Strom, the independent director, is the representative appointed by CiBanco on behalf of those financial creditors. His authority derives from the Delaware court's April 30, 2025 order. That order is still in effect as far as the Delaware court is concerned.

The $20 million price for the Mexican parks is notable, but maybe not for the reason you think.

The former management's press release says the amount is "substantially lower than the price at which these assets were valued by the financial creditors themselves." That's a classic restructuring argument - management claiming the sale is a fire sale that strips creditor value. But without knowing what valuation those creditors used or under what assumptions, the gap is a number without a frame. $20 million is a number. Whether it's a bargain for the buyer or a giveaway depends on what the parks actually earn and what it costs to maintain the animals inside them.

The Dolphin Company operates roughly 2,400 animals across 80-plus species. The remaining Mexican parks house more than 100 marine mammals alone. Dolphin and sea lion care is expensive - specialized veterinary work, water quality systems, feed, enclosure maintenance. A buyer who picks up these assets also picks up a very real operating liability.

Delphinus's CEO, Rodrigo Constandse, signed the purchase agreement alongside Strom. Delphinus already runs swim-with-dolphins operations in the Riviera Maya. The deal makes operational sense for a competitor that wants scale - more parks, more animals, more captive market share. Whether it creates the monopoly Albor's camp claims is a regulatory question, not a market one. The Mexican competition authority would decide that, and current management has explicitly deferred to that process.

The earlier chaos gives you a sense of what sort of company you're dealing with.

In April 2025, the Delaware court heard reports that Albor had seized the Cancún headquarters with armed associates, then returned with 20 people claiming to be state police officers to forcibly retake the building. Albor's counsel said the story was backwards - the restructuring team was the one trespassing, and Albor had legitimate court orders. The Delaware judge fined Albor $10,000 a day for violating the automatic stay by interfering with operations and diverting ticket-sale revenue.

That's not exactly the background you want when you're trying to sell the remaining assets of a Chapter 11 estate. But it is the background you get when a founder has been running a company across two jurisdictions without a clear map of which judge is in charge.

The simplest model is this: a company that grew from a family-run aquarium business in Cancún into an international park operator ended up with its legal, operational, and financial infrastructure spread across Delaware, Mexico, Florida, the Cayman Islands, and elsewhere. When the lenders moved to take control, they used the US bankruptcy court as the enforcement mechanism. When the founder resisted, he used Mexican courts. Now both sides are arguing over which filing wins.

Judge Silverstein hasn't ruled on Albor's request to dismiss the entire Chapter 11 case. She hasn't ruled on the $20 million sale motion. The outcome of those rulings - not the press releases - will determine who controls the remaining parks and the animals in them.

The buyer has already signed. The lenders want their money. The former founder wants his company back. The dolphins, as they say, are waiting.