Toshiba wants to wash its hands of Westinghouse by end of March

Planned sale of Japanese company’s memory chip arm drives Westinghouse drop

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Toshiba’s decision to sell some $5 billion in stock to avoid being delisted from the Tokyo Stock Exchange doesn’t change much for Westinghouse Electric Co., which Toshiba owns but wishes it didn’t.

The Japanese conglomerate has been trying to sell Westinghouse since the Cranberrybased nuclear firm filed for bankruptcy in March.

This week, Toshiba said it wants to get rid of all of its Westinghouse ties by March 2018. That means finding someone interested in buying Westinghouse and assuming Toshiba’s claims against Westinghouse — the money it says it is owed by the U.S. firm now caught up in bankruptcy court.

Toshiba also said it wants to pay the nearly $6 billion that it promised to U.S. utilities involved in building Westinghouse AP1000 plants as soon as possible. It believes that paying that obligation in full will give it the right to seek reimbursement for that sum from Westinghouse — another asset Toshiba would seek to sell to a third party.

During the summer, Toshiba negotiated with Southern Co. — the owner of the Vogtle project in Georgia that is the only new nuclear construction moving forward in the U.S. following Westinghouse’s bankruptcy — to pay it $3.68 billion in installments through 2021.

The Japanese company also made a deal this summer with South Carolina utilities SCE&G and Santee Cooper to pay them $2.17 billion through September 2022. The two utilities called off work on two Westinghouse nuclear power plants in July.

But Toshiba, which bought Westinghouse in 2006 for a whopping $5.4 billion, wants to