Jack Cooper Transport, a specialized operator that hauls automobiles for carmakers, plans to submit a bid backed by $1 billion in financing and support from the Teamsters union and some U.S. lawmakers that would halt the liquidation of trucking giant Yellow and seek to resurrect the shuttered business, the Wall Street Journal reported. The improbable effort would require the Treasury Department to defer repayment for several years of a $700 million loan provided to Yellow under a COVID pandemic-era bailout, one of several debts that helped push one of the country’s biggest truckers into collapse earlier this year. The Jack Cooper Transport bid would provide about $1 billion to pay off other secured creditors, offer unsecured creditors shares in the business and hire back some of the 22,000 Teamsters members that lost their jobs when the company shut down over the summer, according to the people familiar with the matter. It would restore operations under a new, leaner company and seek to win back freight business that has dispersed to other carriers. The effort comes as the sale of Yellow’s sprawling network of trucking terminals and tens of thousands of trucks and trailers is moving through U.S. Bankruptcy Court. The bankruptcy process has a deadline Thursday for submission of bids for real-estate assets, with a minimum of $1.525 billion already set for the land and buildings ahead of an auction scheduled for Nov. 28. That would be enough to repay the company’s secured creditors, including the $700 million federal loan, and to cover wages and other payments owed to laid off workers.
