The new management of Mexican airline Interjet has hired a restructuring firm to help overcome its $1.25 billion of inherited debt as the company looks to restart operations, Bloomberg News reported. The airline, now controlled by businessman Alejandro del Valle, has brought on Mexico City-based Argoss Partners to help resolve issues with creditors via a prepackaged bankruptcy and obtain debtor-in-possession financing. Interjet plans to submit a restructuring plan to Mexico’s bankruptcy regulator for review in the coming weeks.
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Mexico
A U.S. bankruptcy court will allow Grupo Aeromexico, which operates Mexico's largest airline, to increase the size of its fleet of planes, the company said on Friday, Reuters reported. Last week, Aeromexico agreed to purchase two dozen Boeing planes as part of a deal that should yield an estimated $2 billion in savings due to better conditions in some long-term maintenance for its existing fleet and leasing contracts.
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Interjet shareholders unanimously voted to approve a filing for bankruptcy protection, a move that would enable the Mexican airline to resume payments to employees that have been frozen for several months, Bloomberg reported. Alejandro del Valle, who took a 90% stake in the carrier late last year, led discussions over the filing with former majority owners and founders Miguel Aleman Magnani and his father, Miguel Aleman Velasco. Interjet is the second Mexican airline to file for bankruptcy protection since the start of the coronavirus pandemic last year.
Canadian National Railway on Tuesday offered to buy Kansas City Southern for $33.7 billion, topping a $29 billion bid put forward last month by a rival railroad operator, Canadian Pacific, the New York Times reported. The competing offers underline the riches expected to come from trade flows after the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement was passed into law last year. A merger with either suitor would create a railroad line that stretches from Canada to Mexico.
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Grupo Televisa SAB is in talks to join forces with Univision Communications Inc., according to people familiar with the matter, a deal that could more formally unite the Spanish-language media giants after a long partnership, Bloomberg News reported. With discussions at an early stage, no final decision has been made and talks could fall through. The two sides are still discussing the structure of a potential transaction and which parts of the businesses could merge.
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U.S. private equity firm Blackstone in 2016 unplugged a Texas power plant that it owned from the state’s grid in a bet that it could make a fortune as the only American-based generator selling electricity exclusively to Mexico. That bet has gone south, Reuters reported. Nearly five years later, Blackstone’s gas-fired plant, Frontera Holdings LLC, is struggling to exit bankruptcy after burning investors holding nearly $1 billion of its debt - the victim of a succession of problems ranging from a power market collapse in Mexico in 2020 to last month’s severe cold snap.
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President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has never been short of criticisms about his predecessor’s legacy. But he has reserved a special contempt for the sweeping overhaul that opened Mexico’s tightly held energy industry to the private sector, the New York Times reported. He has called the changes a form of legalized “pillaging,” the product of corruption and a resounding failure. He has suggested that some foreign energy investors are “looting” the nation and that Mexican lawyers who work for them are guilty of treason.
Mexico’s Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled in favor of the country’s telecoms regulator over a label that aims to curb the dominance of Carlos Slim’s telecommunications company America Movil, Reuters reported. The ruling deals a blow to one of the country’s largest companies in its ongoing fight to peel back restrictions. Mexico’s Federal Institute of Telecommunications (IFT) acted within the constitution when it determined that the America Movil Economic Interest Group, made up of Telcel and other subsidiaries, is a “preponderant agent”, the court said in a statement.
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Mexico does not see the need to reduce its oil exports, as many Latin American producers did last year, because demand and pricing for its flagship crude remains firm, the head of state oil company Pemex’s commercial arm said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. Mexico briefly joined an effort by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies last year to reduce production to revive crude prices but it limited its contribution to the cuts to 100,000 barrels per day (bpd) for a couple of months through June. The nation had to curb fuel imports amid lower demand.
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