Fla. investor offers to help hotelier buy Tribune chain
CHICAGO — A Florida investor in Tribune Publishing has offered to invest $100 million in Maryland hotel executive Stewart Bainum’s bid to buy the Chicago-based newspaper chain.
Former media industry executive Mason Slaine, who until recently was Tribune Publishing’s third-largest shareholder, said he reached out to Bainum on Monday to offer his financial support and media experience in an effort to thwart a plan by hedge fund Alden Global Capital to buy the company.
“I let the Bainum group know of my interest,” Slaine said. “They’re thinking about it.”
A Bainum spokesman did not immediately return a request for comment.
Alden, a New York-based hedge fund and Tribune Publishing’s largest shareholder with a 31.6% stake, reached an agreement last month to buy the rest of the company at $17.25 per share and take it private. The deal, which values Tribune Publishing at $633 million, requires approval from two-thirds of the other shareholders in a proxy vote to be scheduled, as well as regulatory approval.
Slaine, who acquired much of his 8.1% stake in Tribune Publishing last year on the open market at less than $7 per share, has sold off large chunks of his position. Most recently, on Thursday he sold 450,000 shares for $17.26 per share, reducing his stake to 1.26 million shares, or 3.4% of the company.
“I just had basically given up and started selling shares on the open market,” Slaine said.
Slaine said he had a change of heart over the weekend when he read a New York Times story
that Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss had joined Bainum’s efforts to buy Tribune Publishing for $18.50 per share, or about $680 million.
An octogenarian former CEO of medical device manufacturer Synthes who lives in Wyoming and runs a conservation foundation, Wyss told The New York Times that he wanted to support journalism and guide the fortunes of the Chicago Tribune, the flagship newspaper of Tribune Publishing.
Wyss did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In addition to the Chicago Tribune, Tribune Publishing owns The Baltimore Sun; the Hartford Courant; the Orlando Sentinel; the South Florida Sun Sentinel; New York Daily News; the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland; The Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania; the Daily Press in Newport News, Virginia; and The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Virginia.
The chairman of Maryland-based
Choice Hotels International, Bainum signed a nonbinding agreement to buy The Baltimore Sun for $65 million upon Alden’s acquisition of Tribune Publishing. That deal hit a snag last month over the terms of a transition services agreement for the Sun, leading Bainum to seek an exit from the deal to pursue buying all of Tribune Publishing, the New York Times reported.
Bainum made the $18.50 per share offer for the whole company March 16, Tribune Publishing said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing last week, contingent on raising $650 million needed to finance the deal. Tribune Publishing’s board recommended shareholders approve Alden’s offer, but gave Bainum the green light to pursue financing for the higher bid.
Tim Ragones, a spokesman for a three-member special committee of the Tribune Publishing board that vetted the Alden offer, declined to comment.