aqib
Registered User
- Feb 13, 2012
- 5,583
- 1,604
No. The implication I've been making for years is that everything has been on the NHL's dime via LOC or some other similar mechanism.
This also would fit with the recent comments by Morgan about him walking away with way less than the reported 1 billion.
An LOC doesn’t mean it’s taking from the league unless the league has had to make the payments on it and at this point we don’t (and probably won’t ever) know.
Hell after five years we don’t even know how Meruelo actually acquired the franchise. Speculation is he assumed the LOC off IceArizona but that’s it.
If you go back through every sale from when Burke sold to Ellman it's been the new owner assuming debt and then adding some.
The NHL created the debts in the bankruptcy but they became Ice Arizona's lender.
So Muruelo may have tripped a covenant in the loan agreement which would have triggered a default which is how the NHL was able to bully him into the sale.
Now if you assume the $500M purchase price was 100% debt and all the losses over 5 years were financed by debt then the billion probably cleared all of that a left a couple of hundred million for his trouble.