The Delaware Department of Justice announced late Tuesday that four limited liability companies linked to classified advertising website Backpage.com have agreed to relinquish their certificates of formation, nearly seven months after the Attorney General's Office sued to shut them down in the wake of a sex trafficking conspiracy.

The DOJ said in a statement that the LLCs, Backpage.com, Website Technologies, Posting Solutions and Amstel River Holdings, would lose their certificates of formation under a consent judgment, issued Tuesday by the Delaware Court of Chancery.

The cancellation, which will take effect 31 days after federal criminal charges against Backpage.com are resolved, marked the first time that officials in the First State have used a provision of Delaware law that allows the attorney general's office to petition for the dissolution of LLCs that abuse their “powers, privileges or existence.”

“In this first use of that power with regard to LLCs, DOJ and the court have set a precedent for using that power to address a company whose formation was largely used to promote criminal activity,” Attorney General Kathy Jennings said in a press release.

The lawsuit, filed in November 2018 under former Attorney General Matt Denn, targeted Backpage.com after it was seized by federal law enforcement last April. The company has since pleaded guilty to crimes related to human trafficking and has agreed to forfeit its assets to the federal government.

Backpage.com's CEO, Carl Ferrer, has pleaded guilty to conspiracy, prostitution and money laundering charges. Meanwhile, three other LLCs—Website Technologies, Posting Solutions and Amstel River Holdings—have pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering and forfeited all corporate assets related to the scheme.

Denn's complaint alleged that the LLCs had generated “hundreds of millions” of dollars in revenue from advertising illegal “adult” and “escort” services on Backpage.com and engaged in a “company-wide culture” of hiding the true nature of services the site offered, including the sex trafficking of minors.

Jennings, who took office in January, said Tuesday's consent judgment was the result of a request from her office and negotiations with the company. According to the press release, the cancellation would occur one month after the criminal case is resolved, at the request of the U.S. attorney for the District of Arizona, which is prosecuting Backpage.com and the related LLCs.

The General Assembly unanimously passed legislation last June authorizing the the attorney general to seek the dissolution of abusive LLCs, at a time when scrutiny of the secretive entities has been on the rise.

The state in recent years has found itself at the center of a national conversation after the 2016 release of the Panama Papers revealed how the wealthy secretly store assets in offshore shell companies, registered in business-friendly states like Wyoming, Nevada and Delaware.

Delaware LLCs have also been linked to separate schemes by Jack Abramoff, a disgraced lobbyist, and Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, to launder money. Michael Cohen, a former attorney and self-proclaimed “fixer” for President Donald Trump, created a Delaware LLC in October 2016 to make a hush-money payment to Stephanie Clifford, the adult-film actress who performed under the name Stormy Daniels and said she had engaged in a sexual relationship with Trump.

State lawmakers have faced calls to approve bills to more closely regulate the entities and their beneficial owners, but have so have balked at the requests.

In March, the government-transparency group Delaware Coalition for Open Government argue that current law provides for loopholes in corporate statutes that enable bad actors to commit crimes and evade law-enforcement investigations. In March, the group called on Delaware's congressional delegation in Washington, D.C., to introduce legislation that would create a national database to better track LLCs and their beneficial owners.