Felix Dennis Cackles, Having Sold Private Equity Goons Quadrangle a US $250 Million Hospital Pass

The Bearded Dwarf rides again. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Alpha Media, the publisher of Maxim and music magazine Blender, is currently “in restructuring talks that are expected to turn over the company to creditors.”

Publishing mogul Felix Dennis is presumably laughing long and hard in the direction of the bronze statue of Charles Darwin sitting in the ‘garden of heroes’ at his Warwickshire mansion; he sold Alpha Media to Wall Street bigshot Steve Rattner’s Quadrangle private equity firm in 2007 for approx. US $240 (of which US $90 million was equity, the rest debt). In the intervening period, Alpha Media’s EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortisation – a measure of a company’s operating cashflow) has fallen from approx. US $28 million to US $8 million, and the WSJ claims Alpha Media has been forced to violate debt agreements with its creditors. Not good. 

Dennis was wistful when discussing the Alpha Media sale with the Guardian back in October; “If I’ve created Maxim, and sold Maxim, and I’m 100 million quid richer, it’s over, it’s finished. There is no over or finished for a person who writes a novel, or poetry. No poetry that I’m aware of, however bad or glorious, has ever left somebody a worse person than they were before they read it. Whereas monstrous amounts of wealth lead only in one direction. They can only lead to the degradation, to whatever degree, of the person involved. No one is a better person for having a large sum of money at their disposal. No one!”

Still, the knowledge that he’s dodged a bullet and considerably enriched himself in the process will probably cheer him up a little!

Posted by Jack Roberts in Creative Economy | November 25, 2008 12:08PM |