Time is running out for Sears, the retailer’s largest investor and chief executive warned Monday.
With the company facing a large loan payment due next month, Edward Lampert, who serves as both Sears’ CEO and its most influential shareholder and lender, said it needed to drastically restructure its debts to avoid “alternatives.”
Those alternatives include bankruptcy.
Lampert’s hedge fund, ESL Investments has proposed a series of deals that would reduce the retailer’s $5.6 billion debt load. They include selling off many of its remaining stores and asking lenders to exchange their loans for equity stakes in the beleaguered company.
The proposal, which ESL outlined in a securities filing Monday, amounts to a wholesale financial restructuring of the company outside of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing.