Fertitta Entertainment settles merger dispute; Texas Tower offers glimpse of future
Fertitta Entertainment agreed to pay as much as $33 million to avoid a legal battle after backing out of an $8.6 billion merger slated to take a swath of Tilman Fertitta’s casino and restaurant empire public.
The company reached a termination and settlement deal Thursday with FAST Acquisition, the blank-check company it planned to merge with, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The proposed merger of Fertitta Entertainment and FAST had been in development since February, when Fertitta said he planned to take much of his hospitality company public through the deal. Both companies deny breaking the merger contract, but “believe that litigation relating to the foregoing matters would be expensive, time-consuming, distracting and disruptive,” according to the settlement.
Latest amenities
Texas Tower, a 47-story office building in downtown Houston, was unveiled last week as a futuristic workplace designed to benefit the health and productivity of its occupants.
The building at 845 Texas Ave., developed by Hines of Houston and Ivanhoe Cambridge of Montreal, provides an example of how the global pandemic is changing what companies want from an office, featuring space, light and flexibility. The opening of Texas Tower comes 50 years after Hines debuted its first downtown skyscraper — the 50-story, travertine-clad One Shell Plaza at 910 Louisiana
Developed on the block formerly occupied by the Houston Chronicle next to the Theater District, the 1.2 million-squarefoot building offers the latest services and amenities, including outdoor terraces, a health club, conference facilities, lounge areas, a library, restaurants, coworking spaces and Amazon and cold-storage lockers. Texas Tower, which will welcome its first tenants next year, is 45 percent leased.
Luxury home sales jump
Million-dollar homes are popping up all over Texas as rising prices push more sales over the threshold for luxury.
The luxury market, defined as houses selling for $1 million and up, gained momentum in major markets across Texas as the volume of sales nearly doubled over the last year, according to a report by Texas Realtors, a trade group.
Nearly 12,000 million-dollar homes were sold in the 12 months ending in October, a 90 percent jump from the same period a year earlier, according to the 2021 Texas Luxury Home Sales Report. The value of the sales also nearly doubled from the previous year to about $20 billion.
Dallas led the state in luxury sales with 3,818 homes in the 12 months ending in October, up more than 80 percent during the same period a year earlier. Luxury sales in the Houston rose by 77 percent over the year to 3,264.
Sales of luxury homes in Austin more than doubled to 3,103, totaling $5.2 billion. Luxury
home sales in San Antonio also more than doubled to 622.
Houston airports get boost
Work underway at Houston’s major airports will get a lift from nearly $55 million in federal funds authorized in the recently approved infrastructure law.
The Federal Aviation Administration of Thursday announced how it will allocate the first $3 billion in new funds for airports from the infrastructure law, money that could spur upgrades in
terminals and on the tarmac to help get passengers to planes more quickly and into the air on time.
It’s the first major new tranche of federal airport funding since the stimulus adopted after the financial crisis more than a decade ago. It also represents a new level of investment by the federal government in terminals — at an average of 40 years old — which could help airports update aging facilities by plugging gaps in existing funding sources.
Bush Intercontinental Airport will receive $40.2 million and Hobby Airport will receive $14.7 million, according to the FAA.
Chemical plants expand
Petrochemical giants are expanding their Baytown plants and production capacity to meet rising demand for plastics. Chevron Phillips Chemical on Wednesday became the latest to expand its footprint, announcing plans to build a propylene unit at its Baytown plant. The project is expected to support more than 350 construction jobs.
Exxon Mobil last month began its previously announced $2 billion expansion of its petrochemical complex in Baytown.
Cyclyx International, a New Hampshire-based plastic feedstock management company, said it plans to build the nation’s first large-scale plant to recycle plastics that currently cannot be recycled. The facility will be located near Exxon’s plastics recycling plant in Baytown.
New CEO at LyondellBasell
LyondellBasell on Monday named Peter Vanacker, CEO of the Finnish oil and renewable energy company Neste, as the new chief executive of the Dutch and Houston-based petrochemical giant.
Vanacker, who will start by June 2022, succeeds Bob Patel, who will retire from LyondellBasell at the end of this year to head Maryland chemical company W.R Grace. Ken Lane, LyondellBasell’s executive vice president of global olefins and polyolefins, will serve as interim CEO during the transition.