New Owners of Tribune Company - Employees
Mark Lacter at
LA Biz Observed has a reaction to this mornings proposal regarding the future of the Tribune Company.
"The Chicago Tribune reports that Zell is proposing a deal in which his firm would work with an employee stock ownership plan to buy up all of Tribune stock and then take the company private. There are a couple of obvious plusses: ESOPs allow writeoffs on the money used to pay back the debt taken on to buy the company; and it gets the Chandler family, which currently owns 20 percent of Tribune and has been a huge pain in the neck, out of the picture. Of course, it also means that Tribune employees would be the new owners of what's currently a pretty lousy company."