SEE SALLIE SINK
Billionaire J. Christopher Flowers officially rang the death knell yesterday on the $25 billion takeover of Sallie Mae, the nation’s biggest student loan lender and one of the biggest leveraged buyouts of the year.
Sallie’s stock plummeted nearly 11 percent yesterday to $28.49 after the company cut its profit forecast and announced that Flowers and his partners at JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America refused to restart talks about a possible deal.
Sources close to the situation said Sallie’s tough-as-nails chief Albert Lord approached the Flowers buying group last week about making a new offer to acquire the company, but was rebuffed.
“We advised Sallie Mae that based on Sallie Mae’s public and private statements and actions, we did not believe that we would be able to make a new offer at a price that Sallie Mae would accept and declined Sallie Mae’s offer,” said a source close to the buying group.
Sallie’s profits have fallen amid a rise in borrowing costs and loan defaults. Per-share profit will be $2.60 to $2.80 next year, down from a previous forecast of $3.25, the company said yesterday.
Sallie’s stock is now trading at less than half the $60 per share price that Flowers agreed to in April, and several hedge funds that bet on the merger deal have been hammered. Wall Street giants Highbridge Capital, D.E. Shaw and Perry Capital all own millions of Sallie shares and are furious at Lord for not negotiating earlier.
“Lord is just an old school guy who felt the two sides had a contract, but he didn’t factor in the current environment,” said one source close to the deal.
In October, Flowers revised his offer for Sallie to $50 a share and warrants that the group said could be worth $10 a share if the company met its financial expectations.
The busted deal is also a black eye for UBS banker Oliver Sarkozy and Ken Moelis, a former UBS banker who now runs his own advisory firm. The two represented Sallie in the negotiations with Flowers and stood to receive a combined $100 million in fees if the deal closed.
The two sides continue to fight in court over the $900 million break-up fee that Sallie claims Flowers owes because he walked away from the deal without cause.
Flowers claims he owes nothing because a deterioration in Sallie’s business and new legislation that cuts federal subsidies to student lenders allows him to get out of the deal.