Word: kirche
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...turn to the equity markets to take his very privately held vision public, it all goes horribly wrong. Creditors come calling, demanding their loans back. Parts of the business lose money. The billionaire faces a financial bloodbath. Riveting stuff, right? Were his empire not under such dire pressure, Leo Kirch might have found something to appreciate in his current predicament...
These are tumultuous times for Kirch and his eponymous media empire, which is carrying up to $5 billion in bank debt and faces at least $2.1 billion in additional financial obligations. Kirch?s investors and creditors are becoming twitchy, jockeying for position to salvage any slices from what may be a crumbling pie. Last week, Axel Springer, a German publishing concern, exercised a "put" option that required Kirch to purchase $662 million-worth of shares. Later this year, British TV station BSkyB, which has a $1.5 billion "put" option, may follow suit...
...Kirch?s empire is famously opaque and riddled with complicated corporate cross-holdings. "The whole Kirch group has various contracts with various players," says Rolf Elgeti, a strategist at Commerzbank Securities. "Nobody really knows what is actually going on." But if the dominoes begin to tumble, Kirch may have to give up significant parts of the conglomerate he built from scratch over more than four decades. And, should the controversy taint friends who helped him along the way, he may not be the only high-profile casualty. One of his staunchest backers is Edmund Stoiber, premier of Bavaria...
...businessman as smart as Kirch get into such a mess? Like media groups all over the world, the global economic downturn and the consequent slump in advertising have hurt the Kirch group. But most commentators trace his current troubles back to his foray in the 1990s into German pay-TV. Estimates suggest that by 1996, Kirch had invested close to $5 billion in digital technology and programming for pay-TV services. In 1999, he spent $1.27 billion to gain control of Premiere, his flagship pay-TV service. It was one risk too many. Since the start of 1999, KirchPayTV...
Formula One racing is popular around the world, with more than 350 million fans regularly watching it on broadcast TV. Some carmakers fear that Kirch Media, the German company that will control worldwide TV rights for the next 100 years, will use racing to boost its ailing pay-per-view channels. These carmakers, who sponsor racing in return for advertising reach, want to protect against that. So Ford, Fiat, Daimler-Chrysler, BMW and Renault have proposed an as-yet-unnamed rival racing circuit, to debut when team contracts are up for renewal in 2008. Kirch spokesman Hartmut Schulz insists, "Carmakers...