Obscene $787.5 Million Settlement With Fox News ‘Turns Dominion Into Private Equity Gold’
A private equity firm run by “veterans of The Carlyle Group” which bought a 76% stake in Dominion Voting Systems for only $38 million in 2018 is cashing in massively on Dominion’s $787 million settlement with Fox News. From Axios, “Fox News settlement turns Dominion into private equity gold”: Staple Street Capital bought Dominion Voting Systems in 2018, with […]
A private equity firm run by “veterans of The Carlyle Group” which bought a 76% stake in Dominion Voting Systems for only $38 million in 2018 is cashing in massively on Dominion’s $787 million settlement with Fox News.
From Axios, “Fox News settlement turns Dominion into private equity gold”:
Staple Street Capital bought Dominion Voting Systems in 2018, with a $38 million equity check and an $80 million enterprise value. It might have been the best private equity deal ever.
[…] By the numbers: Denver-based Dominion will be required to pay taxes on its windfall, plus give a hearty portion to attorneys. But this is still a massive amount of cash for a company of its size.
– Dominion currently generates around $45 million in annual EBITDA, up from $10 million in 2018, according to comments this morning from Staple Street co-founder Hootan Yaghoobzadeh on CNBC.
– In terms of revenue, Forbes once reported that Dominion generated $118.3 million for the three-year period between 2017 and 2019.
– Fox Corp. has just over $4 billion of cash on hand, and may have an insurance policy that helps it defray some of the settlement costs.
Look ahead: Yaghoobzadeh told CNBC that settlement proceeds will be distributed to shareholders, adding that Dominion management and employees “own a very significant stake in the business.”
That’s the same line one of Dominion’s lawyers fed to CNN.
Reuters has more:
In one of the court filings, Fox cited a December 2020 text from a former Staple Street employee to a current executive that proved prescient.
“Would be pretty unreal if you guys like 20x’ed your Dominion investment with these lawsuits,” the text read.
Our justice system has become a joke.
