“Good” Citadel and “Bad” Citadel – over the weekend, I noticed that the 100 or so small market pre-merger Citadel stations (the ones collected by Larry Wilson and then bought by Forstmann Little) have not had a “Change of Control” or license assignment filed at the FCC. Since Citadel is now in Bankruptcy, what happened here?
The answer seems to be that as part of the merger process, they created Citadel Broadcasting Corporation (with 71% of the “ownership” in publicly traded shares, but control by the PE firm). Citadel CORPORATION owns two subsidiaries – Citadel Company that owns the original stations, and Alphabet Acquisition Company (“ABC…”) which holds the ABC Radio stations. Only the Alphabet stations are showing as having a debtor in possession, which suggests the debt in default only has a legal claim against the ABC stations (which their money was used to buy).
I speculated way back in early 2009 that Citadel might ultimately be split back into the Larry Wilson company (that Farid Suleman has no interest in running) and sold off… wouldn’t it be rich if they were sold back to Larry Wilson at Alpha Broadcasting?
