Heide & Cook will exit bankruptcy under aegis of Alaskan owners

Kamaaina mechanical engineering firm Heide & Cook Ltd. is poised to emerge from bankruptcy and continue a 66-year run in business after the sale of most its assets to a Native Alaskan-owned conglomerate.

An affiliate of Chugach Alaska Corp. completed its acquisition Monday after approval from a U.S. Bankruptcy Court judge last month.

The deal provides for Heide & Cook’s roughly 75 employees to remain with the company and continue serving customers. The firm’s president, Earle Matsuda, will also retain his position. However, unsecured creditors owed about $3.5 million will receive little payment, according to Jim Wagner, a local bankruptcy attorney representing Heide & Cook.

Heide & Cook filed for Chapter 11 in February, after debts incurred to expand business during a booming economy in 2005 could not be satisfied when the economy contracted a few years later.

The company reached out to Chugach as a potential buyer to avoid bankruptcy, but Chugach pursued an acquisition through bankruptcy by acquiring $4.6 million in debt held by Bank of Hawaii for $1.4 million, and providing Heide & Cook another $250,000 to continue operations under Chapter 11.

Chugach became Heide & Cook’s largest creditor and paid an additional $378,000 to primarily settle taxes and bankruptcy expenses and bring the company out of bankruptcy as its new owner.

As part of the sale, Heide & Cook will emerge with a slightly different name, Heide & Cook LLC, instead of Heide & Cook Ltd., and will no longer be a Native Hawaiian-owned company.

Chugach is a conglomerate set up in 1972 as part of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act enacted by Congress a year earlier. Native Alaskans became shareholders in Chugach corporations organized to administer land and money they received under the act.

Matsuda, who had co-owned Heide & Cook, said the deal with Chugach gives the storied engineering firm a new opportunity for the future.

"With their help we are better positioned to expand our business and take advantage of emerging markets in Hawaii and throughout the Pacific," he said.

Heide & Cook was established by Harold J. Heide and Jarrad T. Cook, who met while working for a contractor building Trip­ler Army Medical Center in 1946, according to an account by the Hawaii chapter of the American Society of Heating Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers Inc.

The two men started their own business, H&C Plumbers, that year, and in 1950 incorporated as Heide & Cook. The company’s first proj­ect was installing plumbing for a new subdivision, Aina Haina, the account said.

Cook died in 1965. Heide died in 1988.

Matsuda, the firm’s chief estimator, who joined the company in 1974 as a sheet metal apprentice, took over in 1991. Four years later he bought Heide & Cook with Dexter Kekua and a third partner who later exited, the trade publication said.