Since I last wrote on Credit Slips about The Weinstein Co. chapter 11, the sale of the company to Lantern Capital has  closed. Shortly after it closed, it was announced that Harvey Weinstein's brother Bob Weinstein was resigning from the TWC board of directors, along with several others. (If you read the investigative news reporting on TWC last fall through winter, you may be wondering why there hadn't been earlier board turnover. I have no good answer). Also of potential interest is that, after the closing of the sale, Lantern was immediately sued in California state court by another investment firm for breaching written and oral agreements connected with due diligence that allegedly gave Lantern a bidding advantage in buying TWC. 

The seventh public court hearing, on July 11, 2018, paved the way for the sale to close. It was then and there that Judge Sontchi, filling in for Judge Walrath, approved an amendment to the sale agreement reducing the sale price. The judge telegraphed early in hearing #7 that he viewed other pending objections (dealing with executory contracts and default cure amounts, which still remain pending) as collateral attacks on the prior sale order. The objection that would have prompted a bona fide evidentiary hearing, from the creditors' committee, had been settled.  Although hearing #8 on July 18 was extremely brief, it is clear there's much left to be worked out behind the scenes in this case – most notably, how to allocate the money.

All Credit Slips readers are old enough to remember when a quick going-concern sale of The Weinstein Company was said to be imperative. So much so that even the seemingly skeptical creditors' committee ultimately went along, thus making the request to sell the company to Lantern Capital uncontested.

On June 22, at its 6th hearing, and about 6 weeks after the court's sale approval, TWC essentially acknowledged it cannot close the sale to its stalking horse bidder on the terms requested and approved by the court, and certainly not by the end of June as represented at hearing #5. TWC therefore will be seeking court approval for Lantern to acquire the company for less money than the agreement and court order specified. By the creditors' committee's calculation, TWC is seeking a 11% reduction in the cash price, but that estimate is one of several points of contention between it and TWC. Given the dates and deadlines in various financing orders and deals, TWC said the issue absolutely positively must be resolved in early July – while the presiding judge is out of the country. The parties did not embrace the presiding judge's suggestion of a popular federal court tool: mediation by a fellow sitting judge. So a key outcome of the June 22 hearing is that a different Delaware bankruptcy judge will preside over a July 11 hearing on changing the TWC/Lantern deal. That judge already has held a quickly-scheduled telephonic status conference today, June 25 (see dockets ##1106, 1107).

As an outside observer not privy to the negotiations, I have no idea whether this deal will close. Perhaps due to lack of imagination, I have never understood how a potential purchaser could be deemed the highest and best bid for a company without a basic understanding what contracts and licenses were included. Meanwhile, especially if it was true that some competing bidders could not meet the deadline due to inability to get information from TWC in a timely fashion, significantly changing the deal without resuming some competitive process seems troubling.

No one at the June 22 hearing disputed that general unsecured creditors would be directly affected by TWC's request to change the terms of the sale. But the judge implied some skepticism by asking whether, say, "very secured" creditors have reason to care. The answer depends, it seems to me, on how  "very secured" is determined, due to allocation issues among entities in the TWC corporate family. If there was ever a case to highlight why one should resist the assertion of a single waterfall, it is this one.