© 2013 The Texas Lawbook.
By Mark Curriden
Senior Writer for The Texas Lawbook
(June 14) – Dallas-based Belo Corp. announced Thursday that it is selling all of its TV operations to Gannett Co., Inc. for $2.2 billion. The deal does not involve A.H. Belo, which is a separate publicly traded company that has newspapers, including The Dallas Morning News, as its assets.
Under the deal, Gannett will buy all outstanding shares of Belo stock for $1.5 billion and assume $715 million in debt. Belo owns 20 television stations, including WFAA in Dallas, KVUE in Austin, KHOU in Houston and KENS in San Antonio.
Guy Kerr, Belo’s executive vice president for law and government, and Russell Coleman, the company’s general counsel, hired New York-based Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to advise the corporation on the transaction. Wachtell is widely viewed as the most elite and most expensive of the top tier Wall Street law firms.
The reason a company such as Belo hires an expensive legal operation such as Wachtell is because if anything ever goes wrong in deal negotiations, Belo can say that they hired the best of the best.
RBC Capital Markets, LLC is providing financial advice to Belo.
Belo frequently employs a handful of Texas law firms, including Jackson Walker and Vinson & Elkins, to handle its litigation and regulatory efforts.
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