Trustee, creditors seek
delay in Hawaiian Air
bankruptcy
Hawaiian Airlines trustee Joshua Gotbaum and the carrier's unsecured creditors committee are seeking to push back deadlines and hearings in the airline's reorganization process for approximately one month to gain more time to study competing proposals to rebuild the company.
Gotbaum and the committee filed a motion yesterday in federal Bankruptcy Court that said they have narrowed their list of potential partners in a reorganization plan to two groups whose proposals "require more complex financial arrangements than the simple equity investments originally contemplated." The motion didn't identify the two groups, but sources close to the situation said they are New York-based investment bank Jefferies & Co. and American Capital Strategies Ltd., a Bethesda, Md.-based buyout and financing company.
The filing said that two recent events have altered the landscape of Hawaiian's bankruptcy case, requiring an extension.
One is the emergence of the Ranch Capital LLC investment group that now controls the airline's parent company Hawaiian Holdings Inc. The filing said that a reorganization summary filed by Ranch Capital will be compared with the plans of the other two groups before Gotbaum and the committee decide with whom to team up.
The other event is that the Internal Revenue Service has filed a $128.9 million tax claim against Hawaiian.
The IRS recently amended that claim. The change is that Hawaiian will have six years to pay off $126 million, or whatever amount is settled upon. The remaining $3 million, or whatever amount is settled upon, must be paid before Hawaiian can emerge from Chapter 11.
Gotbaum said confirmation of a reorganization plan will be delayed until the tax claim has been finalized.
Meanwhile, private equity firms Indigo Partners LLC and Wexford Capital LLC have been eliminated from the reorganization process.
The trustee and creditors committee are proposing Aug. 30 as the new deadline for filing reorganization plans for Hawaiian, Sept. 9 for modifying those plans and Nov. 15 or later for a confirmation hearing.