Weinstein Co. $500M sale falls through
ALBANY — A $500 million deal to sell disgraced former Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein’s old company collapsed Sunday night after state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office sued the fallen film producer and his company.
According to The Wall Street Journal, a group led by businesswoman Maria Contreras-Sweet was “about to consummate” the sale, until the lawsuit lowered the curtain on the purchase.
Schneiderman did not seek a restraining order halting the sale, but the lawsuit was enough to convince Contreras-Sweet and her team to back out.
An agreement was set to be formalized Sunday to sell the Weinstein Co. to the group of investors led by Contreras-Sweet, former President Barack Obama’s head of the Small Business Administration. Among the investors was Ron Burkle’s Yucaipa Companies.
Schneiderman had raised concerns about various components of the deal, and on Sunday filed a civil rights lawsuit against the Weinstein Co., Harvey Weinstein, and his brother, Robert Weinstein.
The Daily News reported Saturday night that Schneiderman’s office raised a number of concerns about the deal with the parties, including the expected naming of Weinstein Co. Chief Operating Officer David Glasser as the new organization’s CEO.
Schneiderman’s office determined through interviews and documents during its ongoing four-month probe into the Weinstein Co. that Glasser was an “enabler” of Weinstein’s bad conduct, a source told The News.
“We expressed to them how important it is that any deal adequately compensate victims, protect employees and not reward those who enabled or perpetuated this egregious sexual misconduct,” said Schneiderman spokeswoman Amy Spitalnick.
“We were surprised to learn,” she said, “they were not serious about discussing any of those issues or even sharing the most basic information about how they planned to address them.”
But a second source close to the deal said the attorney general’s office wanted oversight into who runs the company.
The source also said the sale would have been good for Weinstein’s victims since Contreras-Sweet has proposed a $50 million victims compensation fund.
But Schneiderman spokesman Eric Soufer said his office’s review of the proposed deal did not include such a fund.
The lawsuit said the sale “could leave survivors of Respondents’ unlawful conduct without adequate redress (and) enable perpetrators or enablers of misconduct to obtain unwarranted financial benefits.”