Mets ownership has selected a group led by former Glencore Int'l Managing Dir Ray Bartoszek and Carriage House Partners' Anthony Lanza as the "preferred bidder" to acquire a minority stake in the club, and the sides "have been in advanced talks since last week on the proposed deal" to sell up to a 49% share for $200M, according to sources cited by Kosman & Robbins of the N.Y. POST. The talks "could be wrapped up and announced before the end of the month." A source said, "They are pretty close to a deal." Sources said that one sticking points is "whether the bidders will be allowed to purchase a small piece" of SportsNet N.Y. The team is "hoping to close on a deal by June 30 so it can use the investment cash to fund day-to-day operations and repay some debt." Kosman & Robbins report with attendance at Citi Field down about 10% from last season, the Mets "are on track to lose" $60M in '11 (N.Y. POST, 5/24).
ORDER IN THE COURT: In N.Y., Serge Kovaleski reports among the points Mets Owners Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz "have been most insistent about in their legal fight with the trustee for the victims of Bernard L. Madoff's fraud has been their claim to have been completely forthcoming during the trustee’s investigation of their finances." In their March motion to dismiss the $1B lawsuit from Madoff trustee Irving Picard, Wilpon and Katz said, "Nearly 700,000 pages of documents, comprised of both hard copy and electronic documents, were produced over the course of approximately one year." Last week, however, Picard "challenged the accuracy and sincerity of the claims of cooperation by the owners." He asserted in court papers that "most of the documents that were turned over were routine financial statements, almost all of them peripheral to the substance of the case" (N.Y. TIMES, 5/24). Meanwhile, a source indicated that an office park in Hauppauge, N.Y., owned by Wilpon and Katz "will be turned over to its creditors after more than a year of missed mortgage payments." An investment fund established by Sterling American Property Inc. purchased the Woodlands Office Park for $20.2M in '06, "before the real estate bubble burst" (NEWSDAY, 5/24).
PLEADING THEIR CASE: In an extensive piece in the latest issue of the NEW YORKER, Jeffrey Toobin notes Wilpon and Katz are "steadfast in their insistence that they had no hint that anything with Madoff was amiss." Wilpon insisted that he had "no way of knowing that Madoff’s operation was a fraud." Wilpon: “We certainly wouldn’t have had five hundred and fifty million dollars invested in something that’s a Ponzi scheme, when you know it can only evaporate at some point. We didn’t know.” Madoff said in an e-mail, "Fred was not [at] all stock market savvy and Saul was not really either. They were strictly Real Estate people. Although I explained the Strategy to them they were not sophisticated enough to evaluate it properly, nor were most of my other individual clients. They were not in a position to perform the necessary due diligence and did not have access to necessary financial info or records. ... Fred and Saul were only guilty of trusting their friend and I will live with that guilt and shame forever" (NEW YORKER, 5/30 issue).
FIGHTING TO CLEAR HIS NAME: In N.Y., Thompson, Coffey & Vinton cited a source as saying that two-and-a-half years into a "financial calamity that has rocked Fred Wilpon's world, cost him hundreds of millions of dollars and forced him to put a piece of his baseball team up for sale, Wilpon is more resolved than ever to protect his good name." Even as the trustee in the Madoff bankruptcy case "continues to unleash attacks on his character, and that of his partner, Saul Katz, those close to the Mets' owners say the men are more than willing to settle the contentious and costly case, which is being mediated" by former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, although they are "not willing to do so at further expense to their reputations." A source said, "Fred is absolutely willing to go through the mediation process. They have been cooperating with the process but Fred will adamantly oppose any resolution that would involve any suggestion that there was wrongdoing by him or Saul. This is his life's work, his honor" (N.Y. DAILY NEWS, 5/22).
