Talk about ugly, American Home Mortgage, an outfit which went bust two days before the credit crunch hit a year ago, is now liquidating. We knew equity holders were going to get zippo, nada, zilch, but what about creditors of the mortgage finance company?
They are getting 5.9 cents per dollar owed at most. As my English teacher used to tell me, “Edward, that ain’t good.”
American Home Mortgage Investment Corp AHMIQ.PK, which was among the largest U.S. home loan providers before seeking bankruptcy protection a year ago, said it will pay unsecured creditors no more than 5.9 cents on the dollar as it liquidates assets.
In a disclosure statement filed Friday with the U.S. bankruptcy court in Wilmington, Delaware, the company said many unsecured creditors will recover zero to 2.2 cents on the dollar on their claims.
Creditors whose claims are backed by collateral will recover the full amounts owed, it said. Shareholders will get nothing.
Pretty scary stuff, huh? I bet you some writedowns are coming on the back of this one. If I can get my hands on the court filings I might even be able to figure out who the lucky creditors are. Look at this bankruptcy filing as a harbinger of what’s to come.
Update: Newsday shows who the top creditors are.
The bankruptcy filing listed assets of $20.6 billion and debts of $19.3 billion — but those figures came from the quarter ending March 31, before writedowns on the company’s portfolio led lenders to demand repayment, ultimately bankrupting the company.
Court papers revealed that the company had been engaged in “active, around-the-clock negotiations” for a week starting July 27 with at least four potential purchasers of its loan origination divisions, but said none of those transactions had panned out.
The company’s top creditors read like a who’s who of Wall Street: Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup are in the top 11.
–Newsday, 7 Aug 2007
We should expect some writedowns out of this from Citi, Deutsche, JPM and BofA et al.