Can this pair help Philly land big employers where refineries once stood?

Hilco Global, the Illinois-based developer and troubled-asset liquidator whose unit HRP Group is building the two-square-mile Bellwether District where Philadelphia’s oil refineries used to be, has hired a pair of executives with both regional and federal credentials to advise corporate clients as employers are being recruited for the property.

Patrick J. Murphy, who represented Bucks County in Congress from 2007 to 2011 and served as acting Army secretary at the end of President Barack Obama’s second term, will serve as chairman of the new Hilco Global Geopolitical Unit, the company announced Wednesday.

Murphy, who lives in Bristol and is a partner in the lobbying and consulting firm MKF Advisors, said in a statement that he will head a team to offer Hilco clients research, briefings, and strategic advice amid fast-changing conditions “in an increasingly unpredictable world.”

Alexander Niejelow, a University of Pennsylvania law school graduate who held top cybersecurity jobs on the National Security Council and at Mastercard, is the new chief executive officer of Hilco Global Cyber Advisers. His team will work with Hilco clients on cybersecurity in the face of growing threats, he said.

The two new leaders “will drive the expansion of our capabilities,” adding new Hilco advisory services to help clients “navigate complex risks,” CEO Jeffrey B. Hecktman, who founded Hilco in 1987 from his family’s industrial-supply company, said in a statement.

The company previously recruited well-connected local figures including retired University of Pennsylvania president Judith Rodin as advisers for the Bellwether project.

Hilco and its affiliates are best known as liquidators, taking over, selling, or redeveloping assets of hundreds of troubled companies and investors, including General Motors plants, Rite Aid drugstores, and industrial, commercial, and residential properties across the country, from coastal high-rise towers to defunct auto-repair centers. Hilco says it employs 900 people across five continents.

Hilco subsidiary HRP Group plans at least 14 warehouses and other industrial buildings on the South Philly side of the Schuylkill, which could employ over 10,000 with aid from state and city tax credits and payments to several neighborhood groups. The Bellwether project will cover the waterfront industrial sites where thousands of workers at the former Atlantic Richfield, Sun Oil, and Gulf Oil turned petroleum into gasoline and other fuels and lubricants for more than a century.

That ended in 2019 when private-equity owner Carlyle Group, which bought the refinery complex with state aid and extracted dividends for seven years after Sunoco had planned to shut it down, decided that damage from an explosion and fire wasn’t worth repairing and laid off the last 1,000 workers.

Hilco bought the scarred property out of bankruptcy in 2020 for $252 million and went to work scrapping pipes and tanks and building new foundations and industrial structures as it prospects for tenants. The company took the same approach at Bethlehem Steel’s former Sparrows Point works near Baltimore on the Chesapeake Bay.

HRT Group has talked to potential tenants about adding biotech labs, at least one corporate headquarters, data centers supporting companies’ recent growing demand for artificial-intelligence applications, and other uses, according to industry sources familiar with discussions.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify that HRP Group is building the Bellwether District.