A proposed transaction that saw the arrival of a new licensee for a low-power television station in the Lone Star State was cancelled by the FCC.
On Wednesday, new information was brought to RBR+TVBR‘s attention as to the circumstances leading to the Commission’s decision.
As RBR+TVBR first reported on August 22, The Proctor Group, a broadcast brokerage in Livingston, Tex., had submitted paperwork with the FCC seeking its OK for a transfer of KIPS-LD in Beaumont, Tex., to Roger Mills, who resides in Oregon.
According to broadcast media broker Craig A. Ruark, Mills discovered he had terminal cancer. He and Jerry Proctor, who today is 91 and a semi-retired partner with Ruark, were partners in putting KIPS on the air.
As such, Proctor, who held 50% of the equity interest in the LPTV property, was willing to assume a $23,058.40 payment in unpaid construction costs owed by Proctor and effectively buy out Procter’s interest in the station.
An assignment for license was filed on December 13, 2012, and KIPS went on the air. Then came a deal agreed upon in January 2014 to sell KIPS-LD 6 to Thomas Abraham’s Abraham Telecasting Company LLC. Abraham then agreed to spin the LPTV to Daniel Melendez’s Omega Media Broadcasting. However, the Omega deal, which RBR+TVBR covered at the time it was announced, was never consummated.
Interestingly enough, despite the failure of not having filed an assignment license with the Commission, Melendez assumed KIPS’s operating duties roughly 7 years ago and began making FCC filings on behalf of the station.
It then became known that a transfer from Abraham to Omega wasn’t the only thing the FCC lacked filings for. It turns out that Proctor’s 2014 transaction handing KIPS-LD to Abraham was never submitted for Commission approval … nor was the transfer of KIPS-LD from Mills to Proctor.
All of this was apparently triggered by an FCC review of filings made by Melendez, leading the Commission on August 22 to engage in a mass cancellation of every filing dating to 2012.
Ruark says Proctor, whose surname was incorrectly spelled in archival RBR+TVBR coverage, “had no idea the FCC never acted on the initial assignment application.”
