Happy Halloween: PE-Backed Busts Jump in October
After a quiet September, private equity-backed bankruptcies came roaring back in October, with five LBO'd companies collapsing into Chapter 11. Two more minority stake deals also went belly-up, bringing our grand total of PE-backed busts to 74. That’s 66 control-stake deals and 8 minority stake deals. The biggest fall failure was KKR’s Capmark Financial, formerly part of GMAC. KKR invested $1.5 billion to buy the company, while taking on Capmark’s $7 billion in debt. It didn’t work out too well. THL Partners’ home ventilation products company, Nortek, also filed for a long-anticipated Chapter 11. The 2004 deal was valued at $1.75 billion, but THL Partners has already earned back 95% of its investment through dividend recaps.
30 October 2009•1 min read
