Toys R Us (Short Severance Payments). Ok, this is getting out of hand. Shortly after Dan Primack wrote that KKR ought to pay for 30,000 employees’ severance OUT OF THE GOODNESS OF KKR’S HEART, Pitchbook jumped in parroting the same nonsense.
Look. Don’t get us wrong. Long time readers know that we’ve been hyper-critical of the PE bros since our inception. But this is just ludicrous already. In “💩Will KKR Pay Toys' Severance?💩” and again in “🔥Amazon is a Beast🔥” we noted that “[t]here’s ZERO CHANCE IN HELL KKR funds severance payments.” We stand by that. Without any legal compunction to do so, these guys aren’t going to just open up their coffers to dole out alms to the affected. That’s not maximizing shareholder value. Those affected aren’t exactly future LPs.
But wait. This keeps getting better.
On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that on July 5:
Nineteen members of Congress sent a letter to the private-equity backers of Toys “R” Us Inc. questioning their role in the toy retailer’s bankruptcy and criticizing the leveraged-buyout model as an engine of business failure and job loss.
The letter’s content? Per the WSJ:
It asks whether the investment firms deliberately pushed Toys “R” Us into bankruptcy and encourages them to compensate the roughly 33,000 workers who lost their jobs.
Take a look at this letter. It demonstrates an utter lack of understanding of how private equity works.
Meanwhile, Congress cannot get the President of the United States to turn over his tax returns with the entire country waiting for that to happen and yet we’re supposed to believe that a letter will compel KKR to make severance payments. Utterly laughable. KKR owns those fools and they know it. Okay: maybe not Bernie Sanders.
Imagine the response:
“Um, yes, Representative Poindexter. We did. We deliberately flushed hundreds of millions of dollars of equity checks down the toilet. We hear that makes a compelling marketing message to potential LPs of our next big fund.”
Thankfully, you don’t have to imagine the response because KKR already responded. Per the WSJ:
KKR issued a response dated July 6 stating that Toys “R” Us’s troubles were caused by market forces—specifically the growth of e-commerce retailers—and that the decision to liquidate was made by the company’s creditors, not KKR, and was against the firm’s wishes.
Furthermore:
KKR stated in its response that it reinvested $3.5 billion in Toys “R” Us over the course of its ownership and didn’t take any investment profits. It added that it wrote down its entire equity investment of $418 million and challenged reports that it had earned a profit on the investment.
“Even accounting for fees received from Toys ‘R’ Us, we have lost many millions of dollars. To find anyone who profited, one would need to look at the institutions that pushed for Toys to liquidate its U.S. business,” the firm wrote.
In other words: “Pound sand, Sanders.”
