North Carolina’s appeals court upheld civil contempt against Greg Lindberg and Global Growth for violating a Temporary Restraining Order protecting insolvent insurers under rehabilitation.
The North Carolina Court of Appeals on December 3, 2025, affirmed a Wake County order holding Defendant Greg E. Lindberg and Global Growth Holdings, LLC in civil contempt for violating a Temporary Restraining Order that restricted movements of assets connected to four distressed insurance companies.
The case centers on Southland National Insurance Corporation (in Liquidation), Bankers Life Insurance Company (in Rehabilitation), Colorado Bankers Life Insurance Company (in Rehabilitation), and Southland National Reinsurance Corporation (in Rehabilitation). Lindberg acquired these companies in 2014 and later entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on June 27, 2019. Under the MOU, certain affiliated entities, referred to as Specified Affiliated Companies (SACs), were to be placed under a New Holding Company governed by an independent board by September 30, 2019.
On October 1, 2019, after alleging Lindberg failed to make the SACs subsidiaries of the New Holding Company, the insurers sued for breach of the MOU and fraud, and obtained a Temporary Restraining Order. That TRO barred defendants from selling, encumbering, or otherwise devaluing the SACs, extended to other Lindberg-affiliated entities due to the complex structure of loans and holdings, and restrained dissipation of defendants’ own assets. On October 7, 2019, with the parties’ consent, the trial court entered a consent extension of the TRO.
Following a bench trial in 2021, the trial court ordered specific performance of the MOU. Later, the insurers returned to court alleging TRO violations based on a detailed forensic accounting. Forensic accountant Carey Miller analyzed financial records from October 1, 2019, through January 31, 2023, and identified, among other things, that the FinCos (SAC financing companies) transferred a net total in the tens of millions of dollars to Global Growth, and that Global Growth and the SACs together transferred substantial sums to entities described as Lindberg Personal Vehicles.
In May 2024, the trial court modified the TRO, kept the existing restrictions in place, imposed additional transaction limits, and appointed a limited receiver over Global Growth to monitor compliance. The receiver later reported transactions in May 2024 that potentially violated the modified TRO, including a transfer of $633 million of preferred equity in Global Growth, a payment of over $500,000 of Lindberg’s personal expenses, and a payment of over $1 million to a non-SAC company controlled by Lindberg.
At the August 1, 2024, show-cause hearing, Global Growth’s chief operating officer and chief financial officer testified. Lindberg did not appear; the trial court held him in criminal contempt for that failure to appear and issued a warrant for his arrest. Plaintiffs presented testimony from Miller; from Global Growth’s former general counsel; and from a representative of American Academy of Professional Coders (AAPC), a non-SAC company in which defendants held an economic interest through a non-depository trust.
On August 30, 2024, the trial court entered its civil contempt order. It found that the net total of funds Global Growth sent to Lindberg Personal Vehicles, combined with Global Growth’s spending on private planes and payments to a ghostwriter for Lindberg’s book “Failing Early & Failing Often,” violated the TRO in the amount of $52,424,571. It also found that certain transfers from SACs to Lindberg personal entities violated the TRO and that transfers in a net total of $56,901,099 from SAC non-operating shell entities to Global Growth violated the TRO.
The court concluded that Lindberg and Global Growth had the ability to purge their contempt. It relied in part on testimony that AAPC was owned by a non-depository trust in which Global Growth had an economic interest, that any net sale proceeds (after paying AAPC’s debts) could flow to that trust and then be distributed to Global Growth, and that such distributable proceeds likely would exceed $70 million. The AAPC representative testified that AAPC had no objection to being sold for a fair price and that a sale could occur in roughly six to twelve months if Global Growth did not exercise its veto power.
To purge the contempt, the order required Global Growth to pay $56,901,099 for the benefit of the FinCos. It required Lindberg to pay $52,424,571 for the benefit of Global Growth, along with additional specified amounts for the benefit of GB Capital, Eli Global, LLC, Eli Research, LLC, the ARM Companies, and the ECL Group. The trial court also inferred that defendants could borrow against or sell Global Growth’s interest in the trust that owns AAPC.
On appeal, Lindberg and Global Growth argued that the trial court’s findings on their present ability to comply were not supported by competent evidence, that the contempt order violated the state constitution’s prohibition on imprisonment for debt, and that they had purged any contempt or were not in continuing violation of the TRO at the time of the hearing.
The Court of Appeals rejected those arguments. It held that, given the unchallenged findings about defendants’ interests in AAPC and the trust structure, there was sufficient evidence that they could take reasonable measures – such as a sale or borrowing against that interest – to comply with the purge conditions. It concluded Article I, Section 28 of the North Carolina Constitution did not apply because the imprisonment risk flowed from willful disobedience of a court order, not from mere nonpayment of a debt. It also held that defendants, who bore the burden at the show-cause stage, did not show that the challenged transfers had been reversed or otherwise brought into compliance with the TRO by the time of the hearing.
The court further denied defendants’ request that it take judicial notice of a later Motion to Dissolve the TRO and to discharge the limited receiver and special master, finding that the motion’s contents were disputed and immaterial to whether contempt existed when the trial court ruled.
For insurers, groups with complex affiliate structures, and their boards and executives, the decision illustrates that, in a rehabilitation or liquidation setting, courts will closely scrutinize related-party transfers and expect companies to use available corporate assets and interests to support compliance with asset-protection orders.
