Burger King Still Owes Whoppers of Debt

The latest reorganization could’ve been torn from the playbook of Gordon “Greed is Good” Gekko: A troika of private equity firms, lead by the likes of Bain Capital and Goldman Sachs Funds, orchestrated a controversial public offering in May 2006 — but not before pocketing more than $700 million in fees and dividends. Financing this avarice was almost $1 billion in debt heaped on the balance sheet inherited by the new shareholders (and the equity funds still own a 32 percent stake, at an essential cost basis of pennies per share).

Read More »

Rubenstein: No $10 Billion L.B.O.’s Anytime Soon

Mr. Rubenstein, the Carlyle Group founder, told Bloomberg Television in an interview on Thursday that many of the elements are in place for a recovery in the leveraged buyout industry. But the big deals from the golden age remain highly unlikely: “If you want to do a $10 or a $20 billion buyout, I think that’s unrealistic in this day and age right now.” DDIFO Members may watch the video.

Read More »

Save BIG and Boost Cash Flow with Cost Segregation

With tax season upon us, Dunkin’ Donuts franchise owners might be interested to know about noteworthy tax-saving strategies. Enter: cost segregation which, depending largely on the scope of a franchisee’s holdings and investments, can yield upwards of $1 million in additional tax deductions. DDIFO Members Only Restricted Content.

Read More »

Citizens’ pain: A $600M loss

A unit of Citizens Financial Group recently reported a full-year net loss of $600.4 million for 2009 after charging off more than $2 billion in bad loans. RBS Citizens, the No. 2 retail bank in Massachusetts, disclosed the loss in a financial report filed with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. The bank was not available to comment for this story

Read More »

The Mysterious Case of the Missing $3 Trillion

Suzanne McGee writes at Portfolio.com that the financial crisis has changed the way people think about risk. At the end of every three-month period, data providers crunch through a mountain of information about stock and bond deals, M&A activity, and all kinds of other financing to produce the much-scrutinized “league tables.” And the final weeks of December were no exception, as Jody Drulard and his team at Dealogic LLC scrambled to put together a summary of Wall Street’s dealmaking for the watershed year of 2009. But instead of looking at what Wall Street firms had done in 2009 (notably, a big rebound in debt issuance that earned $18.2 billion in fees for investment banks and banks globally), Drulard found himself pondering what wasn’t showing up on the league tables he was compiling. Specifically, that missing $3 trillion or so of capital that Wall Street had raised every year for most of the first decade of the 21st century.

Read More »