A snarky and gossipy article about Peter Brant in the Sunday Style business section of the Times. With barely disguised glee, gossip columnist business reporter David Segal chronicles the decline in Brant's personal life. With the little space he has left over, Segal also writes about Brant's recent business difficulties. Below I've cut and pasted the business-only passages from the four-page article:
. . . he spent the last decade quietly expanding his newsprint manufacturing empire, borrowing hundreds of millions of dollars and gobbling up mills until his company, White Birch, was the second-largest player in North America.
By 2008, he seemed, like our economy, to be a spectacularly efficient money-making machine . . .
So what we have here is a portrait of love and leverage gone wrong, a reversal of fortune that — like so many stories of our economic cratering — would have been hard to imagine a little more than a year ago . . .
For years, the financial foundation of all these ventures has been the newsprint company, which Mr. Brant’s father co-founded in the 1940s. But these are dismal days for anyone selling paper to the print media. Several White Birch rivals have filed for bankruptcy, and White Birch missed an $18 million interest payment due in late September . . .
Mr. Brant’s creditors — a group of hedge funds — might be running out of patience. Last year, they hired a law firm, Latham & Watkins, and an investment bank, Rothschild, both of which have expertise in bankruptcy. This and other tea leaves have a number of analysts and trade reporters contending that White Birch may be on the verge of a major restructuring or worse.
“Information leaks out here and there, but the company is not very transparent,” says Jim Rowland, an analyst
