The Robert Allen Duralee bankruptcy saga has turned the web page on a new chapter—the beleaguered fabric massive has an ability client. In an e mail to employees sent on Friday, CEO Lee Silberman announced that his company has “entered into an asset buy agreement with RADG Holdings, LLC with appreciate to its proposed buy of The Robert Allen Duralee Group … pointless to mention, we’re all very thrilled.”
The bid is for $19 million. If some other entity wishes to outbid the “stalking horse” (the primary mover in a bankruptcy shopping settlement), it’s going to should pony up $19.7 million or extra. If no new bid emerges via the stop of the month, RADG Holdings will own Robert Allen Duralee.
Who or what is RADG Holdings? Here’s what we recognize thus far.
On legal files filed with the declaration, it’s indicated that Brant Enderle is the supervisor of RADG Holdings, and that the corporation’s offices are situated in Knoxville, Tennessee. At this early date, it’s not clean if Enderle owns RADG Holdings outright, or whether it’s a shell enterprise set up to represent an investment institution. The LLC become integrated handiest ten days ago in Delaware.
Enderle seems to have no prior connection to the fabric or domestic fixtures enterprise. Recent information articles paint him as a Knoxville actual property developer; his tasks encompass a local brewery that closed in 2017, the website of an abandoned mill slated for business redevelopment, and 900 acres previously owned with the aid of the state electricity employer.
Enderle does have a history in shopping for distressed assets. In 2016, WBIR, a neighborhood information station, said that one in all his companies, Knoxville Partners LLC, purchased a mall in Knoxville for $10.1 million, roughly a third of the appraisal rate. Since then, the mall has struggled to keep tenants, and, for a time, owed over $600,000 in back taxes (the taxes have considering been repaid).
How did we get here
After multiple rounds of pay cuts and layoffs, padlocks on the doorways of its Houston showroom, and rampant rumors of carriers and licensees not getting paid, RADG filed for Chapter 11 in mid-February, a flow that executives hoped might clear the way for a takeover. In a letter to employees, Silberman wrote, “We consider this courtroom-supervised procedure is the fine way to solidify and decorate our monetary function.”
The company has been slowed down by debt, a whole lot of which changed into inherited on the organization’s begin. Following the March 2017 merger of Robert Allen and Duralee, the corporation cut charges via $10 to $12 million in less than a year. However it wasn’t enough. “The largest dirty little secret that [company CFO] Bill Fuchs and I have been keeping from the group is an acknowledgment that once we merged, we were undercapitalized,” Silberman informed the company’s leadership group in a September 2018 assembly. He additionally found out that on the time of the merger, he turned into conscious that non-public equity company Altamont Capital Partners would now not put up extra capital to fund the brand new entity. “Both groups were undercapitalized before the merger, and the merged entity remained undercapitalized,” he said.
Unable to break its long-term rentals, the employer turned into additionally caught paying double the team of workers and lease at multiple design facilities; it’s also extensively-known that the pc systems of the 2 corporations ought to never be absolutely integrated, costing extra money and time. Then, income declined in 2017 and 2018 with the aid of 14 percent.
In an April 2018 assembly with Altamont, the company informed Silberman that they desired to sell their majority stake within the company—and that they tasked Silberman with finding a new customer. “Since April 26, I had been working complete-time jobs,” stated Silberman in that September assembly, subsequently divulging the information to his group. He in comparison the “benign forget” of Altamont’s control with what he turned into looking for in a new accomplice: “I’ve been making it very clean that once the deal is carried out, we will have the capital we need to pay off our vendors, take care of our mill delays, and fasten all of our technology problems. And the organizations I’m speaking to are properly aware about that situation and are nevertheless involved.”
As of press time, Enderle had now not replied to requests for comment.
