County Biz Icon, Reader’s Digest to File Bankruptcy, Restructure $1.6B Debt

WPCNR DOLLAR DAILY. From Reader’s Digest News Release. (EDITED)  August 18, 2009: The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc. (RDA), a global multi-brand media and marketing company, based in Chappaqua, New York, announced Monday it has reached an agreement in principle with a majority of its senior secured lenders on the terms of a restructuring plan to significantly reduce its debt burden and strengthen the company financially for the future. The restructuring agreement provides that the company’s senior secured lenders will exchange a substantial portion of the company’s $1.6 billion in senior secured debt for equity and provides for a transfer of ownership of the company to the lender group.


Mary Berner, RDA’s President and Chief Executive Officer, said the company will continue to operate normally throughout the restructuring process. “This agreement in principle with our lenders follows months of intensive strategic review of our balance-sheet issues to financially strengthen the company,” she said. “We are gratified to have this support from our secured lender group. The company has strong brands and products, a leadership position in many markets around the world and a solid plan for the future. Restructuring our debt will enable us to have the financial flexibility to move ahead with our growth and transformational initiatives.”


The company has elected not to make a $27 million interest payment due today on its 9 percent Senior Subordinated Notes due 2017. Instead, the company is using the 30-day grace period available on the interest payment to continue discussions with its lender group and other stakeholders regarding the terms of final documentation and to gain additional support for the consensual de-leveraging transaction. Use of the 30-day grace period does not constitute a default that permits acceleration of the Senior Subordinated Notes or any other indebtedness. In addition, RDA continues to be in compliance with its financial covenants. The company’s business operations remain strong, with anticipated Fiscal 2009 revenue declines (not yet reported) in the low single digits, currency neutral, despite the global recession.


As part of the agreement in principle, RDA anticipates implementing the restructuring under court supervision through a voluntary pre-arranged filing under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code, which it expects to complete on an expedited basis while operating business as usual. During the 30-day grace period, the company will seek further consensus among its lenders and other stakeholders in advance of such a filing to facilitate the completion of RDA’s restructuring objectives.


The agreement in principle includes a commitment from certain members of the senior lender group to provide $150 million in new money Debtor-in-Possession (DIP) financing, convertible into exit financing upon emergence, which the company expects will ensure sufficient liquidity during the reorganization process and beyond. In addition to providing RDA with the necessary capital to emerge from Chapter 11, the arrangement also establishes the substantive terms of the $550 million in debt that will remain on RDA’s balance sheet upon emergence, a 75 percent reduction from the current $2.2 billion in debt.


As a result of the agreement reached with a majority of the senior lenders, the company expects that, subject to court approval, the vast majority of its suppliers and vendors will recover in full under a Chapter 11 plan. The Chapter 11 filing will apply only to the company’s U.S. businesses — its operations in Canada, Latin America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia-New Zealand will not be affected. RDA’s International operations are expected to have adequate funding based on continuing operations and access to proceeds from the DIP financing.


“We thank our sponsor Ripplewood Holdings, who has provided inspired vision and stewardship over the last two and a half years, including during this process,” added Chairperson Berner. In March 2007, Ripplewood led a consortium of investors in a transaction that resulted in the company’s acquisition. All of the members of the company’s Board of Directors who have served since the March 2007 acquisition, with the exception of Berner, have resigned from the company’s Board. The two recently appointed directors also continue to serve on the Board.

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One for the Tiger


WPCNR View from the Clubhouse. By Bull Allen August 17, 2009: The headlines this morning out of windswept Chaska, Minnesota, disgust me, and once again distinguish the majority of the “professional” sports writing jury —the play writers out there – for their fickleness,  savagery, and glee they show in attacking great players when they are down.


 



Lake Placid Club. 2009


 





They love doing that.


 


Tiger Woods is being described as “blowing” the PGA Championship to Y. E. Yang, and in one article, a writer called Woods a “choker.”


 


Please. No choker wins 14 majors before age 35. No choker comes from behind in pain on one bad leg to win the U.S. Open as he did last year at Torrey Pines.


 


Tiger Woods is the greatest golfer of all time.


 


His comebacks have been legendary.


 


 He is the greatest competitor you will ever meet. He is a gentleman, despite his temper on the course (mostly directed at himself).  He never loses his will to win, unlike the sports writing hacks who never write a guts column which might take them off the suck-up express. He fights to the last shot.


 


These are the same “reporters” who never reported steroid use, never report womanizing  or hom0sexuality in the NFL by athletes and never had to make a play in a big spot, never have  their writing dissected by fans on whether they should have used an adjective there or asked this question or that, and they never write a big story that will take them off the press box buffet.


 


Could we write something about Mr.Yang and the incredible round he shot yesterday? That, at age 37, he has put Asian golf on the map?


 


The vast majority of writers are not concentrating on Mr. Yang’s wind game. How was he able to master the howling gusts of Hazeltine? Was it his clubs? Let’s concentrate on why Yang won, and not dismiss the Yang triumph by saying Mr.Woods lost it.


 


Also, could we have the courtesy to tell everybody the first two names of Mr. Yang in reporting who won the PGA Championship. (For the record, The Times reported Tuesday his full name is Yong-eun Yang. Took them long enough, didn’t it?)


 


Mr. Yang won the PGA  with a guts-ball shot on eighteen, when he fired away at the green giving it all he had, risking flying the green and the win, because he knew who he was playing. An iron into the green with the lead is going for the clincher, not playing it safe.


 


Yang won the way a big time golf tournament is always won. The Yang shot will take its place with Tom Watson’s chip-in on 18 at Pebble Beach, and Tiger’s own 12 foot putt for birdie to force a playoff at Torrey Pines.


 


Mr. Woods about a year after his catastrophic knee surgery has already won a couple of tournaments this year.. When Ben Hogan recovered from his auto accident in 1951, (far more serious, admittedly), it took him 3 years to recover. Woods, through his sheer force of will is still getting back his game. 


 


Woods practices very hard. So does Mr. Yang.  He plays to win every tournament. He essentially is still getting back his game. He had a day when nothing dropped for him, just as great pitchers sometimes find their stuff is not working for them.


 


To Mr. Woods’ credit, though severely disappointed in his own performance, he came out for the news conference, when I am sure he wanted to head straight to the airport. It was a horrible day for him.


 


The PGA Tour is nothing without Tiger Woods, and they need him more than ever. He is the standard. He is the only player on the tour, who playing on one leg last year, kept winning consistently. And, you know what, Woods never used his leg as an excuse for not winning last year. Unlike some super stars who make excuses all the time.


How consistent has The Tiger been in a game where you make so much money every week, you don’t have to win every week?


 



  1. Woods has won 70 official PGA Tour events, third all time behind Sam Snead and Jack Nicklaus.
  2. Woods has won 14 majors, second all time, behind Jack Nicklaus.
  3. Woods is 14-1 when going into the final round of a major with at least a share of the lead.
  4. Woods owns the lowest career scoring average and the most career earnings of any player in PGA Tour history.
  5. Woods is one of five players (along with Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus, and Gary Player) to have won all four professional major championships in his career, known as the Career Grand Slam, and was the youngest to do so.[1]
  6. Woods is the only player to have won all four professional major championships in a row, accomplishing the feat in the 2000-2001 seasons. This feat became known as the “Tiger Slam”.
  7. Woods set the all-time record for most consecutive cuts made, with 142. The streak started in 1998, he set the record at the 2003 Tour Championship with 114 (passing Byron Nelson‘s previous record of 113) and extended this mark to 142 before it ended on May 13, 2005 at the EDS Byron Nelson Championship. Many consider this to be one of the most remarkable golf accomplishments of all time, given the margin by which he broke the old record (and against stronger fields in terms of depth than those in Nelson’s day) and given that during the streak, the next longest streak by any other player was usually only in the 10s or 20s.[2][3][4][5]
  8. Woods has won a record 30% (70 out of 234) of his professional starts on the PGA Tour

For any writer to say Tiger Woods chokes, well, that writer would be back covering curling if I were the editor.


 


This year, coming back from injury, Mr. Woods still works harder, and plays consistently better than any one else.  Over the weekend we had a cluster of big names who could not shoot par – “good guys who have not won,” that the sportswriting  fraternity loves to write up about as deserving of winning and wants sentimental favorites to win. They think Tiger is boring. Tiger wins because he works hard at his game, and at the same time is by all reports a model father.


 


He doesn’t carry illegal guns into night clubs. He doesn’t pick up strippers and take them back to his team hotel. He does not go on the Disabled List with a twinge in his thigh. He doesn’t do drugs. He carries himself with a maturity beyond his years and you’d be mad, too, if you did not meet your own standards set as high as Tiger sets his. He’s just too good. We love it when underdogs win. It is how the champions react to disappointment that set them apart.


 


 What happened with those “every man” heroes at Hazeltine the sports writers love ? If Tiger was playing so badly, how come they were way down? If Tiger “choked,” those other good guys the sportswriters love, gagged big time.


 


Woods was in it, despite having a bad day,  to the 272nd hole, and it took a   Yang clincher miracle guts approach to beat him. Yang earned it.


 


Mr. Yang can look back on this day as the beginning of a path to greatness, should he choose to take it.


 


Woods is a proud person. A man who when he fails, does not like the taste of it and he takes personal responsibility for it and has the guts to apply himself to make himself better.


 


Next year, Mr. Woods will set himself a goal of winning all the majors – the Grand Slam – to make up for lost time in this, his comeback year—which would tie him with The Golden Bear – another great competitor who also did not like to lose often.


 


Mr. Woods should not attend news conferences in the future considering the vile stuff being written about his performance today by the “sporting press” who are anything but sporting.


 


But he will attend them..


 


Because he has class.


 


Class is something the national sportswriting contingent does not know anything about – because the majority of them do not have it.


 


Mr. Woods, though most likely will be practicing today.

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Hockley to File Signatures to Contend for Mayor Tues. Bradley Fund-Raises.

WPCNR CAMPAIGN2009. August 17, 2009: Councilman Glen Hockley who has been seen gathering signatures on petitions around the city by himself extensively the last few weeks told WPCNR Monday he is planning on filing petitions to run as an independent candidate for Mayor of White Plains on Tuesday. Mr. Hockley declined to say whether he had an “excess” of signatures (1,000 are needed from registered voters), that he was planning on filing with the Board of Elections in White Plains.


 



Glen Hockley, Councilman, announcing his candidacy for Mayor  (opposing Adam Bradley) in June as an independent candidate.


 


Meanwhile, (on another side of town) the frontrunner in the campaign for Mayor, Adam Bradley, continues to fundraise. An invitation to a so-called “Insiders Briefing from Assemblyman Adam Bradley” is being circulated to e-mail on his behalf by the former resident of White Plains, Jeffrey Binder and Paul Noto of  “The Strategic Politic Group for the Bradley Campaign.” The briefing costs $150 per person and will be held September 23 at the home of Karen and Ted Sewitch on Hillair Circle.


Bradley has all five lines on the November ballot: Democrat, Republican, Working Families, Conservative, Independence, but apparently is taking nothing for granted. Mr. Bradley’s Friends of Adam Bradley campaign fund related to his assembly office has  90,223 in its coffers as of July 31, and his other campaign fund, Adam Bradley for White Plains has $149,420.67 in it as of July 31, for a grand total of $239,643.67.


 



 


Jeffrey Binder, who runs the Strategic Planning Group for the Bradley Campaign, voting in 2003, when he ran for Common Council on the Republican line.


 


Binder also represented Councilman Larry Delgado in opposing Glen Hockley’s election to the Common Council (enabled, in part, due to a jammed voting machine in the 2001 election. In that lengthy progression of legal meaneuvers that led to the New York State Court of Appeals which ruled in favor of Mr. Hockley, Mr. Binder’s opposing counsel representing Hockley was Adam Bradley. Now Mr. Binder is supporting Mr. Bradley in his run for Mayor.


 


The Strategic Political Group for the Bradley Campaign has not filed any campaign reports that WPCNR could find on the Board of Elections website. Jeffrey Binder, White Plains political observers may recall ran for Common Council on the Republican Ticket in 2003 with Timothy Sheehan, and since then Mr. Binder has changed his political affiliation to Democratic, to the extent he is now co-chairing a political action committee for Mr. Bradley, apparently. Binder is associated with Jeffrey M. Binder & Associates, P.C. in White Plains.


 


Mayor Joseph Delfino, the current Mayor of  White Plains who announced he was not running for a fourth term in the spring of this year, still maintains a Friends of Joe Delfino campaign fund that contains $106,644.96 as of July 31, 2009. The Mayor by Board of Elections rules, may  keep this money and not return it to contributors as long as it is used for political or charitable purposes, and not diverted to personal use. The Mayor has to date, not indicated he plans to use the money to fund Republican candidates for Common Council or Mr. Hockley, should Mr. Hockley get on the November ballot.


 



 


 


 


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Worker Files Discrimination Suit Against City for Tolerating Racial Harassment

 


 


WPCNR WHITE PLAINS LAW. From News Reports. August 14: Clarence Thrower, an employee of the White Plains Department of Public Works has filed a federal law suit in U.S. District Court against the City of White Plains in which he alleges the city allowed “severe and pervasive racial taunting” directed at him.  The suit alleges a pattern of harassment against him was allowed to exist by the city, that included racial slurs allegedly cast at him “regularly” by a foreman. The forms of harassment included  racial effigies displayed in the workplace and pranks directed at him and two colleagues supporting Thrower in complaining about Thrower’s  treatment by the foreman to supervisors in the Department of Public Works. The suit filed Monday does not request a specific sum of damages Mr. Thrower seeks.

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