How FTI Consulting Concluded the “Restructuring Deal of the Year” for CIT Group
CIT Group, a $70 billion financial services firm providing lending, leasing and advisory services to small and medium-sized enterprises, suffered a significant deterioration in its business and financial condition in the 2008 global financial crisis.
The company retained FTI Consulting to help draft, negotiate and launch an exchange offer and solicit a prepackaged plan of reorganization, including $7.5 billion in financing.
Serving as declarant, we prepared the company for bankruptcy filing on Nov. 1, 2009, and, with our hands-on guidance, CIT Group emerged from bankruptcy just 38 days later. That made it the only bank holding company to complete successfully a Chapter 11 restructuring. The debt had been reduced by $10.5 billion, other debt maturities were deferred and capital ratios were enhanced to levels exceeding regulatory requirements.
It was the largest prepackaged bankruptcy ever completed and Investment Dealers’ Digest magazine’s 2009 “Restructuring Deal of the Year.”
How FTI Consulting Helped Sportsman’s Warehouse Emerge from Chapter 11 with a Stronger Balance Sheet
In less than 10 years, Sportsman’s Warehouse had grown from a single store and wholesale company in Utah to a 67-store national chain with annual sales in excess of $700 million. Unfortunately, in 2007, a faltering economy and tightening credit led to the company becoming highly leveraged with declining sales and severely affected levels of inventory.
Sportsman’s Warehouse called in FTI Consulting to help manage liquidity, to negotiate with lenders prior to filing for bankruptcy in March 2009 and to develop a restructuring strategy.
On our advice, 41 unprofitable and/or geographically non-strategic stores were closed, and the Sportsman’s Warehouse chain was reorganized around 25 stores in key geographic areas. The company emerged from bankruptcy with a stronger balance sheet and renewed vendor support, resulting in dramatically increased same-store sales in its very first post-Chapter 11 year.
The Plan of Reorganization we created was so effective that it was named one of 2009’s top 10 most successful restructurings by Turnarounds & Workouts newsletter.
How FTI Consulting Investigated the Largest Reported Ponzi Scheme in U.S. History
In this historic and internationally publicized case, our Forensic and Litigation Consulting practice was retained by the Liquidation Trustee (Trustee) of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities to provide global investigative fact gathering, forensic accounting, complex financial and enterprise data analytics, certain electronic discovery, and expert witness and trial services.
Our multidisciplinary team coordinated myriad litigation and forensic activities provided to the Trustee, counsel to the Trustee, the Securities Investor Protection Corporation and various international entities such as the Joint Provisional Liquidator in the United Kingdom.
How FTI Consulting Helped Yahoo! with E-discovery for Its Monster/HotJobs Transaction
After Yahoo! Inc. announced the sale of its HotJobs division to Monster in February 2010, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a Second Request. That’s a comprehensive and onerous document and information request for investigations into the competitive effects of acquisitions.
Yahoo! and Latham & Watkins (the law firm retained by Yahoo! to represent its case) selected the Technology practice at FTI Consulting to assist with the necessary e-discovery process.
Through our consulting expertise and proprietary software, Ringtail, we were able to produce all the information that the FTC requested in a manner that was timely and cost-effective for our client. Due to the expediency and quality of the information, the FTC allowed Yahoo!’s successful sale of HotJobs to Monster in August 2010.
How FTI Consulting Helped a Multibillion Dollar Telecoms Company Meet Its E-discovery Obligations
Telco X is a multibillion dollar telecommunications organization with headquarters in the southern United States. It has a staff of approximately 26,000, and most of its legal issues are employee and human resources (HR)-related disputes and privacy and antitrust investigations.
The company adopted FTI Harvester for Microsoft SharePoint for a number of reasons. Several employee disputes involved corporate policies and practices regarding compensation for overtime, travel, and loading and unloading company vehicles. Telco X’s business operations policies (including HR practices) were published on the employee SharePoint site, and the company was obliged to preserve, collect and produce the policies that were accessible to the concerned employees. That involved capturing information on document version control; background materials on the authors, editors and records managers of relevant files (records custodians); research on the physical and logical system administration of the relevant HR files (system custodians); and data on all documents to which employees had access within the corporate HR site.
FTI Consulting worked with Telco X to formulate a solution that would allow it to identify, preserve and collect relevant information while minimizing the risks and costs; document chain of custody and mitigate spoliation risks by mapping the relationship of relevant documents to specific custodians; develop a legally defensible practice for responding to e-discovery obligations in dynamic environments like SharePoint; and, finally, cut down the time and effort required to preserve and collect live SharePoint data.
How FTI Consulting Made Investors Feel Better about Coca-Cola
The Coca-Cola Company is the world's largest beverage company. Even so, during the economic downturn, declining consumer confidence in general and several business setbacks began to worry investors.
FTI Consulting helped assess Coca-Cola’s messaging and perceptions in the investment community. Based on the information obtained, we were able to conceive and execute a plan that radically improved the company’s investor relations (IR).
Starting with its first large investor event in a decade, Coca-Cola subsequently has made a determined effort to improve its investor relations. This has allowed the organization to mitigate investor concerns about several potentially negative legislative and business issues. In addition, the company received best IR program awards from Institutional Investor and IR magazines. Since working with us, Coca-Cola also has decreased its share price volatility and, as a result, received more balanced coverage in the financial media.