A Dallas investor is buying another of the office buildings up for grabs with the bankruptcy of a Houston real estate firm, the Dallas Morning News reported. Hartman SPE is selling its office and retail properties as part of a plan to refocus the real estate investment trust on self-storage properties. The unit of Houston’s Silver Star Properties REIT has been in bankruptcy since this summer following a dispute with the company founder. Hartman recently contracted to sell one of its North Dallas high-rises — a 10-story office on North Central Expressway — to retailer Costco which owns the property next door.
A potential deal to keep SmileDirectClub Inc. afloat has broken down and the once high-flying tooth straightening startup is shutting down, Bloomberg News reported. The publicly traded company, which filed for bankruptcy in late September, had in recent days been negotiating a deal for its founders to provide fresh capital and buy SmileDirectClub out of chapter 11. But the company failed to get its most important lender and other creditors on board, dooming the effort, attorney Spencer Winters said in bankruptcy court Friday. SmileDirectClub sought bidders for the enterprise over the past two months and found some interest, but all suitors dropped out along the way or submitted unworkable bids. The proposed sale to founders took shape only in recent days, but was conditioned on getting the support of lender HPS Investment Partners and lower-ranking creditors, Winters said. “When it came to the founder-led bid, it was really a Hail Mary,” Winters told U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez. “We pushed very, very hard this week and it just didn’t come together.” SmileDirectClub’s 2019 initial public offering valued the company at $8.9 billion, and made its founders billionaires. It later struggled with declining revenues and never turned a profit. The company ended up marred in a patent fight with a rival, and cut sales and marketing drastically during the pandemic shutdowns.
Yellow, the trucking company that shut down its operations and filed for bankruptcy protection this summer, on Wednesday rejected a trucking executive’s bid to buy and restructure its business, the New York Times reported. In a letter sent to the prospective buyer, Yellow’s lawyers contended that the bid was “not viable,” saying they had not gotten any indication that the bid had the support of the company’s creditors, including the Treasury Department, which had made an emergency loan to the company during the pandemic. The letter also said that the plan to revive Yellow underestimated the costs and difficulties of such an effort. The bid would not be “confirmable by a bankruptcy court or in the best interests of Yellow’s stakeholders,” the letter said. Yellow’s management intends to soon complete its own bankruptcy plan, which involves selling off the company’s assets to different buyers. The company this week released the results of an auction in which the winning bidders committed to spend nearly $1.9 billion on 128 terminals, Yellow’s most valuable assets. On Dec. 12, the company plans to seek approval for the sales from a federal bankruptcy judge in Delaware.
Hildred Capital Management is set to buy bankrupt baby brand Hello Bello after nobody bested the healthcare-focused private equity firm’s $65 million opening offer, according to court papers, Bloomberg News reported. Hello Bello, best known for its sustainable diapers, filed for chapter 11 protection less than two months ago. Actors Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard launched the Los Angeles-based company in 2019 alongside a deal to sell the products exclusively at Walmart Inc., according to a statement at the time. Today, its products are also sold at other retailers and online. Hildred plans to combine Hello Bello with Hyland’s Naturals, another portfolio company that sells supplements and over-the-counter medicine, under one umbrella parent company, according to people with knowledge of the plans. Hildred is set to hold Hello Bello in a newly launched continuation fund expected to close above $650 million.
In business restructuring and chapter 11 cases, it’s not all that unusual at the outset for professionals to exclaim at some juncture, “You want me to do what…?” That was the question prior to the initiation of the Laforta-Gestao e Investimentos, Sociedade Unipessol, Lda., et al. (“debtors” or “Laforta”) engagement for the eventual control and sale of the La Muralla IV, a 10-year-old, sixth-generation, ultra-deepwater semi-submersible drilling rig (“La Muralla”).
ABI’s Asset Sales Committee awarded the 2022 Asset Sale of the Year Award to counsel for the stakeholders involved in the successful 11 U.S.C. § 363 sale of the assets and interests of chapter 11 debtor Haven Campus Communities-Starkville, LLC in In re Haven Campus Communities-Starkville, LLC, which came before Hon. Selene Maddox of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Mississippi (Case No. 21-10931-SDM). The committee announced the winners during ABI’s Annual Spring Meeting in Washington, D.C., in April.
Trucking company XPO Inc. won a bid to buy 28 service centers of bankrupt Yellow Corp for $870 million in a closely watched auction of the nearly 100-year-old firm's assets, Reuters reported. Yellow, formerly known as YRC, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in August after blaming the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union for its demise. The company was one of the nation's largest so-called less-than-truckload carriers in the U.S. and owned about 12,000 trucks and 35,000 trailers and its customers included Walmart and Home Depot. XPO expects the deal, which is subject to court approval, to add to core profit in 2024 and adjusted profit per share from continuing operations from 2025, according to a filing on Tuesday. The deal will add "significant footprint in areas where XPO was previously capacity constrained, the path towards the company's 2027 goals," said Jonathan Chappell, analyst at Evercore ISI. The company has also entered into an $870 million credit agreement which it may use to finance a deal it said would help optimize routes for its less-than-truckload transportation in North America.
Yellow is set to raise more than $2 billion after a bankruptcy auction that will disperse much of its national network of truck terminals among rivals, casting deeper doubt on a long shot bid to revive the trucker, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. About a dozen trucking companies bought properties at a court-supervised auction that unloaded 75% of Yellow’s properties for a total of just under $1.9 billion, according to a filing Monday evening in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware. The bids must be approved by the court, which is scheduled to hold a hearing Dec. 12. The remaining properties are expected to fetch hundreds of millions more and to be sold over the coming months, according to a person familiar with the process. The sales pushed further out of reach a trucking group’s bid to revive Yellow as a smaller, leaner carrier and to rehire thousands of employees. The bid includes $1.1 billion in financing and asks creditors, including the federal government, to push back repayment of some debts and to accept equity in the new business.
