Picking Up After "Large Loan" Verrone
Extended Stay went bankrupt, in part, because of its aggressive capital structure. The company was passed from one buyout firm (Blackstone) to another (Lightstone) at the top of the market. The deal, engineered by Wachovia's Rob "Large Loan" Verrone, took the company's debt-to-equity ratio to a crazy 12.7x from the already-high 11.1x at the time Blackstone Group bought it. Verrone got his nickname from his coworkers for obvious reasons. He was later named by the New York Times as part of the problem behind Wachovia's massive writedowns.
15 June 2009•1 min read
