“Good morning Chairman Boucher, Ranking Member Stearns and Subcommittee members, my name is Caroline Beasley. I am the Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of the Beasley Broadcast Group, a family-owned company, which owns and operates 44 radio stations in 11 markets.”.
This is going to come as a surprise to the holders of the 8.5 million shares of Beasely Class A stock they bought on NASDAQ (symbol BBGI) and still hold. [Company Profile]. While it is true the Beasley family holds a controlling majority interest in their company and control its board of directors, it is wrong to characterize the company as a “family owned company”. The company is a publicly traded corporation, of which the Beasley family has a majority ownership stake. The Beasley company has been using borrowed money to try to “buy back” the Class A stock and regain complete ownership, but the Credit Facility was modified in March prohibiting the management from continuing to use the borrowed funds for that purpose. They may intend to use some of the proceeds of the sale of two stations in Las Vegas to buy back the Class A stock in the future, but that’s not the current situation of who owns the company today.
The whole point of Sarbanes-Oxley was to hammer into people’s heads that once you do an IPO and sell stock to the public, your company is no longer your private empire and piggy bank. Your obligation is to protect the interests of all the stockholders, not the pre-IPO management.