70-unit Illinois carrier files for bankruptcy protection

Largest claim against AZA Transportation totals more than $80K; liabilities listed as $500K-$1M

An Illinois carrier has filed for bankruptcy. (Photo: Jim Allen\FreightWaves)

An Illinois carrier with 70 power units recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

AZA Transportation listed assets of between $100,001 and $500,000 on its bankruptcy filing in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Illinois. It is based in Mount Prospect, which is in Cook County, the same county as Chicago. The company listed liabilities of $500,000 to $1 million.

The bankruptcy was filed May 14.

Of the 20 largest creditors listed in the bankruptcy filing, the largest combined claim is from Keystone Equipment Finance Corp. based in West Hartford, Connecticut. It has three separate claims totaling $82,905. 

Another large creditor is Transportation Alliance Bank, based in Ogden, Utah. Its unsecured claim is $43,415, secured by a 2022 Freightliner.

That same bank also has a $23,640 claim against AZA, secured by a Great Dane trailer. 

BMO, the former Bank of Montreal, which is a major lender to the trucking industry, has a claim of just under $20,000.
The total number of creditors is listed as between one and 49. 

According to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s SAFER document on AZA, AZA has 71 drivers for its 70 power units and carries general freight.

The SAFER document reports no crashes for AZA in the 24 months prior to the bankruptcy. Its vehicle out-of-service rate for those two years was 12%, less than the national average of 22.26%. But its driver out-of-service percentage of 9.5% was more than the national average of 6.67%.

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John Kingston

John has an almost 40-year career covering commodities, most of the time at S&P Global Platts. He created the Dated Brent benchmark, now the world’s most important crude oil marker. He was Director of Oil, Director of News, the editor in chief of Platts Oilgram News and the “talking head” for Platts on numerous media outlets, including CNBC, Fox Business and Canada’s BNN. He covered metals before joining Platts and then spent a year running Platts’ metals business as well. He was awarded the International Association of Energy Economics Award for Excellence in Written Journalism in 2015. In 2010, he won two Corporate Achievement Awards from McGraw-Hill, an extremely rare accomplishment, one for steering coverage of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster and the other for the launch of a public affairs television show, Platts Energy Week.