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International Herald Tribune - The mergers and acquisitions business is about to take a deep dive.
For most of the financial crisis, it has remained surprisingly buoyant. This was partly because there was a lot of business to be done selling troubled banks like Merrill Lynch, HBOS and Fortis.
There was also the overhang of deals from the bubble era. But in the past week, two such megadeals - the miner BHP Billiton’s hostile bid for a rival, Rio Tinto, and the planned leveraged buyout of Bell Canada - have come apart at the seams.
As the financing squeeze tightens, other deals could follow suit.
Financing Verizon Wireless’s acquisition of Alltel is proving to be a strain. Verizon Wireless has issued bonds and is looking to raise some bank debt. But the company may have to pay a high price.
Reuters - Leveraged loan prices fell on Wednesday as hedge funds facing redemptions and forced to cover short equity positions sold loans, traders told Reuters Loan Pricing Corp.
Leveraged loans have declined over the past week amid a rout in global markets that has led to the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and a $700 billion U.S. government plan to bail out the financial sector.
The loan credit default swap index, the Markit LCDX10, traded around 93.70-to-93.90 cents on the dollar on Wednesday, down about a point from Tuesday’s close. It hit a low of 93.60-to-93.80 cents on the dollar earlier in the day.
TXU Corp’s leveraged buyout loan was among several that traded down. Its term loan B2 fell to 86.75-to-87.25 cents on the dollar from 87-to-87.5 cents on the dollar on Tuesday afternoon.
Reuters - Final bids for the Chicago Cubs will likely be due late September or early October, two sources said on Thursday, as owner Tribune Co seeks to sell the storied baseball team by the year end.
The next stage in the drawn-out sale of the team, its landmark stadium and a cable TV network stake will be management presentations starting next week to give bidders more information on the assets, the sources said.
Those will likely take about two weeks, after which final bids will be sought.
Tribune, which owns the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times newspapers, put the Cubs assets on the block in April 2007 when it announced it would be bought by a group led by real estate magnate Sam Zell. It is selling the Cubs to cut debt it took on as a result of the leveraged buyout.
Zell said last month that of 10 groups that bid, five made it through the first round for the package of assets — the Cubs, Wrigley Field and an interest in SportsNet Chicago.
Guardian.co.uk - Four large hedge funds, all shareholders of Huntsman Corp, have proposed a plan to salvage a $6.5 billion buyout of the chemical company by a unit of Apollo Global Management.
But Apollo’s Hexion Specialty Chemicals unit late Thursday rejected the plan, saying Huntsman’s increased debt and decreased earnings since the deal was struck in July 2007 would no longer make a combined company solvent.
"We are not seeking to renegotiate this transaction," Hexion responded in a statement. "We are seeking to terminate it, and obtain judicial confirmation that Hexion has no obligation to pursue the acquisition or to pay Huntsman a termination fee."
Apollo’s Hexion has been locked in a legal battle to try to get out of the $28-per-share deal, reached last year at the height of the leveraged-buyout boom. Since then, the credit markets have seized up, making the math behind the deals no longer attractive. In June, Hexion filed suit against Huntsman seeking to limit its liability in the event that the deal falls apart.
International Herald Tribune - Blackstone Group, manager of the world’s largest leveraged-buyout fund, said Wednesday that second-quarter profit beat analysts’ estimates as gains from hedge funds offset a decline in private-equity takeovers.
Net economic income, a measure that excludes some compensation costs, fell 75 percent to $165.6 million, or 15 cents a share, from $655 million, or 58 cents, a year earlier, the New York-based Blackstone said. That exceeded the average estimate of 8 cents a share by 10 analysts in a Bloomberg survey. Revenue declined 63 percent to $353.7 million.
Blackstone’s fees from buying and selling companies have plunged as buyouts of more than $2 billion dried up and initial public offerings fell to their lowest in four years. Investors backed away from the debt used to finance LBOs in the fallout from the collapse of subprime-mortgage securities in the second half of last year.
Bloomberg- When Blackstone Group LP, the world’s biggest buyout firm, was pursuing the takeover of the Weather Channel cable network earlier this month with General Electric Co. and Bain Capital LLC, Wall Street balked at providing financing.
So the New York-based company turned to GSO Capital Partners LP, the hedge-fund manager it acquired in March, to pull off the largest U.S. leveraged buyout this year.
Blackstone can’t wait for banks, stuck with almost $100 billion of debt from earlier LBOs, to start lending again. Instead, it’s pushing deeper into deal financing with GSO. The strategy may hurt the hedge-fund unit’s returns — some approaching 40 percent — if slowing economies lead companies taken private by Blackstone to default on their debt.
Bloomberg- When Blackstone Group LP, the world’s biggest buyout firm, was pursuing the takeover of the Weather Channel cable network earlier this month with General Electric Co. and Bain Capital LLC, Wall Street balked at providing financing.
So the New York-based company turned to GSO Capital Partners LP, the hedge-fund manager it acquired in March, to pull off the largest U.S. leveraged buyout this year.
Blackstone can’t wait for banks, stuck with almost $100 billion of debt from earlier LBOs, to start lending again. Instead, it’s pushing deeper into deal financing with GSO. The strategy may hurt the hedge-fund unit’s returns — some approaching 40 percent — if slowing economies lead companies taken private by Blackstone to default on their debt.
New York (HedgeCo.Net) - CSX and dissident shareholders sounded off yesterday, as they shared their cases to an advisory firm and outlined their differing plans for the railroad operator’s future.
With a proxy fight in the future, TCI and 3G Capital, the two activist hedge funds, will have to urge shareholders to elect their proposed board of directors. Meanwhile, Michael Ward, Chairman and CEO of CSX, has different plans.
He once again pushed for shareholders to reject the hedge funds suggestions, citing their CSX’s strong stock performance in the first quarter and warning that the hedge funds were ultimately interested in a possible leveraged buyout.
TCI head Chris Hohn responded by saying, “If we were just looking to make a quick buck, we would have left CSX a long time ago.”
He went on to say that he is seeking nothing more than operational improvements as well as improvements on the board by replacing those with little or no railroad experience.
This includes placing himself on that board, along with 3G Managing Director Alexandre Behring.
The board of CSX currently has 12 seats. The hedge funds are seeking 5 of those seats and jointly nominated a minority board slate back in December.
The other three nominees are Gilbert Lamphere, who runs a private investment firm but also was a director at Canadian National Railway Co., Timothy O’Toole, Managing Director of the London Underground and Gary Wilson, a former chairman at Northwest Airlines Corp.
The board of directors will be decided by shareholders at the company’s annual meeting on June 25 in New Orleans.
Julie Scuderi Senior Editor for HedgeCo.Net Email: julie@hedgeco.net
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