Neiman Marcus Group Ltd. said in regulatory filings on Friday that it has made significant progress in reaching a deal with bondholders to extend its repayment deadline to 2023, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The deal isn’t final and discussions continue. An agreement to extend debt maturities would allow the retailer to avert a possible default when $5 billion in debt is set to come due in the next two years. The company has been engaged in talks with two separate groups of bondholders and lenders in recent weeks over debt swaps that would allow the company to push out due dates on nearly $5 billion in debt maturing in 2020 and 2021, the company said. Neiman Marcus’s debt load is the result of two buyouts by private-equity firms. The most recent deal was struck in 2013, when Ares Management LLC and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board acquired the company for $6 billion. The negotiations are the second round of talks for the luxury department-store chain. A round of discussions last November ended with no deal. This time the company added a number of sweeteners to the deal, including a slice of preferred equity in MyTheresa, the company’s valuable international e-commerce unit, and the promise to pay down a portion of the company’s loans.
