You’re a young man in Taiwan in the 1950s. You have a dream – you want to be a Radio DJ and come to America. Arthur Liu is that man. He made his way to New York in 1972 and started a Chinese language TV station. He went to Syracuse University and got a Master’s degree in Radio and TV and became a U.S. Citizen.
In 1982, he created MRBI to build a network of radio stations, primarily targeted at recent Asian immigrants like himself. Over time, his radio station empire prospered and grew.
Then in 2004, GE Capital had a problem. They were on the hook for a failed Spanish language radio station operator named Radio Unica that was in bankruptcy. They talked Mr Liu into acquiring the radio stations from the bankruptcy using $150 million in debt which they financed, and used those proceeds to pay off the Radio Unica bondholders and their own credit facility in a prepackaged bankruptcy. In 2007, MRBI was talked into buying 5 TV stations from Scripps, the newspaper company that is having financial problems.
So now MRBI has $275 of debt with GE Capital, a collection of 29 major market AM radio stations and 6 TV stations, mostly running infomericals.
Paging Timothy Geithner. Your order is ready.