I Imagine that the competitors are closely watching, waiting for C11 to go in the wrong direction to get their hands on WIN assets. If that scenario were to happen, what does that mean for the workers? Which employees could be in most danger?
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Federal fraudulent conveyance statute has past. State limitations have not, and those are the ones that have gotten results in SDNY in the past.
"the term of art with the transfer of assets to Uniti at half market value is 'fraudulent conveyance'"
On the site seekingalpha.com, there were some threads about the possibility of the Uniti spinoff being challenged as a fraudulent conveyance. It turn out the statute of limitations for bringing such a suit expired in March of this year.
If you look at articles about Uniti on that site posted within the last 3 months, you'll see that discussion.
@ivrs the term of art with the transfer of assets to Uniti at half market value is "fraudulent conveyance"
Why would anyone want anything but Ilec assets. Windstream has to compete on price because they have so many outages due to poor records and a core network that’s leased.
They Win RFPs completely based on price. Their churn rate has been through the roof over the roof.
WS still owns a lot of assets, they only sold off the OSP stuff and not all of it.
OP, there are no assets to sell. I’d be surprised if they even own the office furniture after the Uniti spin off. As someone who worked in the field in the lead up to it we were doing audits and taking inventory of every screw, nut, and bolt so they could squeeze out every penny of value. It made perfect sense why after the announcement and was a big part of my decision to leave. Windstream is little more than a babysitter for a network they don’t own. When they started shipping the NOC jobs overseas that should have been a huge red flag that they didn’t care anymore.
The lease with Uniti is not at fair market it was originally set up to be a tax shelter after all so it's about double market rate. No company in their right mind could make a viable business plan out of buying the company turning it around with revenue and then using that revenue to pay off both the debt to Aquire Windstream in the first place and the 600 million for the right to use and maintain their own OSP. There is just no net return. The posters on this site bash the brothers Gun and TT but you have to say they protected Windstream and more importantly it's assets from any kind of hostile take over even in the worse situation a company in a takeover prone industry can be in which is in a bankruptcy. Now will the fools use the opportunity to their advantage and keep the cash cow going? Not a chance, but for their efforts they made themselves alot of money. Welcome to vulture capitalism folks.
ILEC: I can see a few smaller local telcos buying pieces of Windstream ILEC business - perhaps everything in their state but overall, I can’t think of any big telcos that would want to buy the whole thing.
On the other hand, the ILEC would be much easier to build a business plan for and set up as a viable, stand-alone business, post-bankruptcy. Plus there’s the hundreds of millions in tax benefits from Windstream’s years of operating losses. They’re hard to transfer to another owner.
The CLEC is trickier for me to predict. If Windstream owned its own fiber, that would be a very valuable asset folks might covet. They don’t — but they do own the right to lease it from Uniti for a certain price.
I don’t know if the Uniti price is above or below market.
What do others see happening?
Sadly no one is safe. Its depressing to go to work and not see my friends that are gone. We had good times