Basically, the company had to pay for its own buyout when private equity firms KKL, Vornado, and Bain bought the company for $6.6 billion, mostly with loans.
Because the company then had to pay off those extreme loans, they were forced to sell off their assets and property, which they leased back from the very private equity firms that now owned them.
The same thing happened more recently with Red Lobster and JoAnn Fabrics.
I generally feel like leveraged buyouts for numbers into the billions are just inside jobs for those selling.
Stay with me for a sec.
So the seller makes a closed door deal with the “buyer” to funnel money back to them personally after the sale is done. So in this case, say, they commit 3.6bn to the “buyers” and pocket 3bn for themselves. Almost the entire purchase is leveraged, with the expectation that it will become unsustainable and go bankrupt shortly after the purchase.
The buyers don’t really give a shit, they’ll write it off, collect whatever they can from insurance, etc. They didn’t really want to company anyways, so they let it fold.
The money they took home from the deal with the seller is entirely theirs, the company bears the weight of the debt and the consequences of defaulting on the debt, so the execs that made the move are basically free and clear.
Everyone wins, except, you know, the poors who work at the purchased company, the banks, who don’t give a shit, and insurance people, which… Nobody gives a fuck about them…
At the end of the day, the execs of the purchasing company get rich, the sellers get rich, and that’s the fucking point.
If the sellers instead just closed up shop, they would get maybe a fraction of the money they would from selling it, mainly in selling off assets… It would be a pittance compared to this scheme.
All they need to do is find someone they can buy out the morals of, to complete the deal. This is surprisingly easy in the corpo world.
Ok, but who is providing the loans for the buy out. When they default on the debt someone or some thing is not getting paid. If that were the case eventually no company would loan money for a leveraged but out right?
Bear with me for a bit, because i don’t understand these schemes.
How would the sellers get more money from this scheme? Isn’t liquidating company assets are basically what the buyers (the private equity firms) did anyway?
How does the insurance companies keep falling for these? This has happened several times, and insurance companies aren’t known for being charitable.
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Every time I read something like this, it makes me want to burn money.