Siris Capital Group LLC and Elliott Management Corp. affiliates are supplying up to $1 billion in financing to their struggling travel-booking platform Travelport Worldwide Ltd., defying the company’s lenders and touching off a legal fight, the Wall Street Journal reported. Travelport said that the loan package, which closed Friday, provides it with much-needed cash to weather the drop-off in passenger flight bookings stemming from the coronavirus pandemic. But the maneuver relies on shifting valuable assets away from Travelport’s lenders, setting up the latest confrontation on Wall Street over how far private-equity firms can go to protect stakes in troubled companies — sometimes at creditors’ expense. The financing is backed by intellectual property that was previously within lenders’ grasp but is now pledged as security for Elliott and Siris, which took Travelport private last year in a roughly $2 billion deal. Lenders including Blackstone Group Inc. have said that the transaction isn’t allowed under their debt documents and strips away property that should be available to satisfy their claims. A New York court might get the final say after Travelport filed a lawsuit on Friday seeking a declaration that no default has occurred.
