REID COLLINS FILES $3.4 BILLION SUIT OVER “SYSTEMATIC VALUE EXTRACTION” THAT LED TO COLLAPSE OF STEWARD HEALTH CARE
AUSTIN, Texas — November 24, 2025 — National trial firm Reid Collins & Tsai LLP announced today that it has filed a $3.4 billion lawsuit on behalf of Mark Kronfeld, Trustee of the SHC Creditor Litigation Trust, against Ralph de la Torre and other Steward insiders for orchestrating what the complaint calls a “years-long extraction of value” that led to the collapse of Steward Health Care. The SHC Creditor Litigation Trust was established in the Steward bankruptcy to investigate and prosecute claims on behalf of Steward’s creditors, including former employees, patients, and vendors.
According to the complaint, the scheme began in 2010 when then CEO Mr. de la Torre convinced Cerberus Capital Management to purchase a struggling hospital network from the Archdiocese of Boston, rebrand it as Steward, and convert it to a for-profit enterprise. As a condition for approving the sale, Massachusetts entered into a series of “Assessment & Monitoring Agreements” with Steward that, among other things, barred Steward from issuing dividends. By the end of 2015, however, the five-year monitorship ended, paving the way for the alleged misconduct.
Working with Cerberus, Steward executives, insiders, and others, the complaint alleges that Mr. de la Torre engineered a decade of self-interested and harmful transactions, most notably multiple sale-leaseback deals that stripped Steward of its hospitals, burdened it with onerous lease obligations, and funneled the sale proceeds to equity holders in the form of massive dividends.
By 2024, Steward had essentially been gutted, with its most valuable assets sold, its operating capital drained, and its facilities deteriorating. Many political and media commentators have described Steward as epitomizing the destructive impact of private equity and corporate greed on the American healthcare system. Indeed, Mr. de la Torre’s conduct at Steward has been the subject of numerous Congressional investigations.
“This wasn’t only mismanagement; it was also a systematic extraction of value from a vital healthcare system serving a low-income population,” said William T. Reid IV, founding partner of Reid Collins. “The damage is staggering, and this lawsuit seeks accountability on a scale that matches the harm.”
The case is brought by national bankruptcy trustee Mark Kronfeld, an attorney, former prosecutor, and seasoned fiduciary who has worked closely with Reid Collins to investigate the transactions on behalf of the SHC Creditor Litigation Trust.
“Mark has been in the trenches with us,” Mr. Reid continued. “He understands exactly how Mr. de la Torre’s misconduct hollowed out this company, and he is committed to recovering every dollar for the Trust’s beneficiaries.”
The Trustee is asserting more than $3.4 billion in claims to redress the harm caused by the misconduct.
The Reid Collins team included William T. Reid IV, Eric D. Madden, Jeremy Wells, J. Benjamin King, Jeffrey E. Gross, Julia Gokhberg and Taylor Lewis.
The case is Mark Kronfeld, as Trustee of the SHC Creditor Litigation Trust v. Ralph de la Torre, et al. (In re Steward Health Care System LLC, et al.), Adv. Proceeding No. 25-03593 (CML) (Bankr. S.D. Tex.).
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.