Word: metromedia
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Once usually restricted to special situations involving relatively small companies, leveraged buyouts have become both popular and big. Last year there were 36 of them worth $7 billion, compared with only 16 in 1979. In one of the biggest deals this year, executives of Metromedia borrowed money to buy the company from its shareholders for $1 billion. Senior managers at Pittsburgh-based Ryan Homes are also trying to take their company private by paying shareholders for it. Last week they bid $176 million for the big homebuilder. Other companies have been acquired by one of a number of investment firms...
Lower prices, though, may be just ahead. To encourage competition, the FCC has also authorized non-Bell companies to provide cellular transmission in 30 large market areas, and about 1,000 firms, including Metromedia and GTE, are competing for licenses in smaller cities. All are expected to fight for customers by lowering prices...
BILLBOARDS. In 1982 Bear, Stearns, a New York brokerage firm, acted as agent for the sale of 45,000 billboards to 534 wealthy investors for $485 million, nearly all of it borrowed. The investors promptly leased them back to the original owner, Broadcaster Metromedia. They are now in the process of rapidly writing off the costs of the billboards. At the end of five years, the plan is to resell them to Metromedia for $645 million, a 33% profit. The outcome: for individual cash investments of $150,000, each investor stands to gain a return in tax savings...
DECISION REVERSED. For Christine Craft, 39, a former Kansas City TV anchorwoman who charged that in 1981 station KMBC, then owned by Metromedia, demoted her because of unhappiness with her appearance; by a federal jury that awarded her $325,000 in damages; in Joplin, Mo. Another federal jury voted Craft $500,000 in damages, but a judge threw that award out. Metromedia plans to appeal...
...that dropped her as an anchor in 1981, charging that she had been discriminated against because of her sex and that the station had fraudulently claimed it had hired her for her journalistic ability and then attempted to remake her on-camera appearance. In August a jury recommended that Metromedia Inc. be found guilty of sex discrimination and awarded Craft $500,000 in damages on the charge of fraud. Last week, however, U.S. District Judge Joseph Stevens overturned the panel's findings and ordered a new trial on the fraud charge. Citing the "pervasive and relent less publicity" surrounding...