Hedge Funds Are Said to Be Buying Carillion Debt for Pennies
Hedge Funds Are Said to Be Buying Carillion Debt for Pennies
(Bloomberg) -- It may have collapsed under 1.6 billion pounds ($2.2 billion) of debt, but for some investors, Carillion Plc still has more to offer.
Distressed debt funds bought bonds issued by the failed U.K.-based builder for about 2 pence on the pound this week, according to people familiar with the trades. Privately placed notes also changed hands at less than 5 pence, they said, asking not to be identified because the trades were private.
Carillion held a range of contracts from building roads to cooking school meals and may retain value if some of those concessions remain in place throughout the liquidation process, the people said. Distressed funds typically buy the debt of insolvent companies at knockdown prices in the expectation it will increase in value during liquidation. Some start by acquiring small amounts, giving them access to company documents that help them decide whether to make a bigger bet.
“The liquidator will be looking at all options from selling the group as a whole to individual contract transfers,” said Stephen Phillips, co-head of European restructuring at law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, based in London. “There may well be money that eventually flows into the estate, depending on how any disputes are settled.”
Recovery Study
Many of Carillion’s contracts fell under the U.K.’s private-finance initiative whereby companies build and operate public projects such as hospitals, schools and roads, with the government returning the money over 25 to 30 years. The U.K. spends 10.3 billion pounds a year servicing PFI ventures according to a government report.
A recovery analysis conducted in September by Slaughter and May, Carillion’s legal adviser, indicated that its creditors may recover between 2.6 pence and 5.3 pence in an insolvency, the people familiar with the matter said.
Carillion’s creditors are likely to get less than 1 pence, The Telegraph reported on Tuesday, citing a witness statement filed at the High Court by its interim chief executive.
Carillion’s debts include an 835 million-pound loan from banks including Barclays Plc, Lloyds Banking Group Plc and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, according to its latest earnings update and data compiled by Bloomberg. The company also has about 630 million pounds of privately placed and convertible bonds on its books.
Pieces of the banks’ revolving credit facility are being quoted between 5 pence and 10 pence, the people said.
Officials at the insolvency service of the U.K. government and Slaughter and May declined to comment on Carillion’s debt.
Bank Exposure
RBS and Lloyds, among the banks with the largest exposure, had already taken writedowns on Carillion in September, a person with knowledge of the matter said at the time.
Shareholders have “no prospect of any return,” liquidator PricewaterhouseCoopers said in a statement on Monday.
To contact the reporters on this story: Luca Casiraghi in London at lcasiraghi@bloomberg.net, Tom Beardsworth in London at tbeardsworth@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Abigail Moses at amoses5@bloomberg.net, Chris Vellacott
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