Walgreens Invites A Rube Goldberg Buyout Plan

Summary

• The struggling $8 bln drugstore is buried under a $36 billion morass of debt, leases and legal costs. Yet, a carefully orchestrated clean-up might extract a salvageable asset.
• Walgreens carries $23.3 billion of lease liabilities and a $6.6 billion burden related to settled litigation over opioid prescriptions.
• Sycamore might nonetheless be willing to go through these contortions anyway because it’s just cheap enough now to be worth it.

RiverNorthPhotography

Cartoonist Rube Goldberg designed fantastical machines to complete simple tasks through tortuously convoluted mechanisms. Buyout shop Sycamore Partners might take his contraptions as a model, judging by a Wall Street Journal report that it’s in talks to acquire