A coal company’s attempt to sue Oakland for $1 billion dollars fell flat this week after a federal judge ruled that the case didn’t belong in his courtroom. 

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Benjamin Beaton, who serves in the Western District of Kentucky, agreed with the city of Oakland and dismissed a lawsuit brought by Insight Terminal Solutions, or ITS. ITS had filed the lawsuit in 2024, claiming the city drove it into bankruptcy by interfering with its lease to redevelop part of the former Oakland Army Base into a coal export terminal. 

ITS argued that the case belonged in Kentucky because that’s where the company had filed for bankruptcy four years earlier, and this legal dispute with Oakland was related. But in his ruling, Beaton cited a federal law that gives judges broad discretion to abstain from hearing a bankruptcy-related proceeding in favor of punting it to a state court. 

“The Court therefore dismisses the case without prejudice,” Beaton wrote. 

“The City of Oakland maintained from the start that this case was improper and should be dismissed,” the city attorney’s office said in a statement. “The district court agreed, and we’re pleased with the result.” 

The win for Oakland is a dramatic reversal from last year when the judge hearing ITS’s bankruptcy case issued a ruling suggesting that Oakland could end up owing the company as much as $654 million. That decision garnered national press attention.

Beaton’s ruling leaves paths open for ITS to file an appeal, or to refile its case in California. Attorneys representing the company did not immediately respond to an interview request to discuss what they plan to do next. 

A complex business deal behind the proposed coal terminal

In 2018, ITS subleased land on Oakland’s waterfront from Oakland Bulk and Oversized Terminal, a developer that for years has been pursuing the construction of a marine export terminal near the former Oakland Army Base. Under the sublease, ITS would have been responsible for actually building and operating the terminal. City officials started fighting the project shortly after learning about it in 2015, battling with the developer in federal and state court. OBOT emerged victorious in 2023, with a state judge ruling that OBOT could continue with the project and that the city had interfered. The city exhausted its legal appeals in 2025. OBOT is moving forward with plans to build a coal-export terminal, which could receive funding from the Trump administration and counties in Utah. 

ITS, which was banking on running the terminal site, filed for bankruptcy in 2019 in the Western District of Kentucky, where its owner, John Siegel, a veteran coal industry executive, lived prior to his death in 2022. In 2020, the company was acquired by one of its former creditors, the California firm Autumn Wind. 

In 2024, ITS filed a complaint in Kentucky bankruptcy court to hold Oakland accountable for interfering with its lease agreement and seeking damages of at least $1 billion. Oakland argued that it wasn’t a creditor and that the federal bankruptcy court didn’t have jurisdiction and tried to have the case dismissed.  

However, last October, federal bankruptcy judge Joan Lloyd ruled that Oakland was responsible for bankrupting ITS because city officials took multiple steps to prevent the company from securing financing and realizing the value of the sublease. At the time, ITS argued that Oakland owed it damages worth over $673 million. 

In Beaton’s ruling on Wednesday, he wrote that it was curious ITS didn’t file a freestanding complaint, but instead pursued an “adversary proceeding” in bankruptcy court. 

“Curiouser still, it hadn’t pursued (or even mentioned) these potential claims in its bankruptcy filings, even though almost all the allegedly tortious conduct by the city occurred before the bankruptcy filing,” Beaton wrote. 

ITS argued that even though Oakland’s allegedly tortious behavior occurred in California, Kentucky was the right venue for the case because the underlying issue was its bankruptcy. 

Beaton appeared to disagree. In laying out considerations for why the case should be adjudicated in a state court, Beaton wrote that the company’s decision to file an adversary proceeding in bankruptcy court, rather than file a lawsuit in California, “carries at least a whiff of forum shopping.” Forum shopping is a practice where litigants try to find favorable jurisdictions to file legal actions. 

The judge added that it would be more appropriate for a case involving two California companies to be dealt with in front of a California jury. In deciding to abstain from hearing the case, Beaton also considered local interests, “including potentially even the insolvency of the City of Oakland.”

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