Bankrupt Hertz Wants to Sell Up to $1 Billion in New Shares
Rental-car company Hertz Global Holdings Inc. wants to capitalize on the rally in its stock seen earlier this week by selling up to $1 billion in shares, despite a bankruptcy that threatens to wipe them out.
Hertz’s shares rose to $5.53 earlier this week, a nearly 10-fold increase over their closing price of 56 cents following the company’s May 22 bankruptcy filing.
Now the company is asking a bankruptcy judge to approve a deal with Jefferies LLC to allow the potential sale of 246.8 million unissued shares.
“The recent market prices of and the trading volumes in Hertz’s common stock potentially present a unique opportunity” for the company to raise capital on more favorable terms than the strings-attached loans that many other bankrupt companies get, the company’s lawyers said Thursday.
The price of Hertz stock has fallen from this week’s earlier high, closing Thursday at $2.06 a share, but the company said its stock is still actively traded.
Jared Ellias, a law professor at the University of California Hastings College of Law, said he has studied hundreds of bankruptcies and never seen a company try to fund a case with an equity offering at the start of chapter 11.
“Hertz looks at the market and sees there is a group of irrational traders who are buying the stock, and the response to that is to seek to sell stock to these people in hopes of raising some amounts of money to fund their restructuring,” Mr. Elias said.
Brilliant! Hertz sees a lot of retail “investors” who like to play hot potato with its stock, and says “fuck it, let’s sell them some of our worthless shares, and pocket the dough!”
Since May, the board has already been doing shady stuff like giving execs 16.2 million in “retention” cash bonuses, while all the directors are selling their holdings in HTZ.
One exec, Jodi Allen, chief marketing officer, was allocated $189,633 in bonuses — under the stipulation that it be repaid if the recipient “voluntarily leaves before March 22, 2021.”
On June 5, an 8-k filling noted that she was “terminated without cause” —which means she gets to keep her bonus. It’s good to be in the C-suite.
Jan 2022: Hertz, JcPenney’s, and Virgin Galactic are now owned wholly by retail investors.
and they merged into the mighty JC Galactic Hertz
their business model is selling high failure rate low orbital flights on decommissioned rental rockets from SpaceX at your local mega mall.
This is the type of clown show inverted nonsense the communist price-fixers at the Federal Reserve have wrought in the financial "markets". t.co/oqR7ApKnml
— EndTheFed.org (@EndTheFed_org) June 12, 2020
Hertz: There are only two times to issue equity, when you have to and when you are stupid not to.
Sometimes the stars align.
— Peter Atwater (@Peter_Atwater) June 12, 2020
Hertz Trades 50% Higher On Plan To Sell Bankrupt Stock To Robinhooders | Zero Hedge t.co/dQCt1i5pKU
— ⚡️Darth Maul⚡️ (@malimujo) June 12, 2020