BUSINESS BRIEFS
HEI sells $115M worth of stock
Advertiser Staff
Hawaiian Electric Industries Inc. said yesterday it sold $115 million worth of stock to help pay off debt and make loans to its electric utility subsidiary.
HEI's shares closed down 17 cents at $25.87 yesterday. The shares fell an additional $2.16, or 8.35 percent in after-hours trading.
"HEI intends to use the net proceeds from the sale to repay its outstanding short-term indebtedness consisting of borrowings under its line of credit facility and commercial paper borrowings and to make loans to its subsidiary, Hawaiian Electric Company Inc.," the company said in a news release.
The loans to HECO would be used to repay a portion of the utility's outstanding commercial paper borrowings that were partly used to finance HECO's capital spending programs.
MESA PARTS INVENTORY SOLD FOR $3M
Mesa Air Group, the parent company of go! airlines, said it has finalized the sale of its spare parts inventory to Fokker Services Inc.
Under the agreement, Fokker Services will pay Mesa $3 million in cash for the spare parts and will manage and repair the inventory for Mesa's fleet of 16 DHC8-200 aircraft at a flat hourly rate based on fleet flight hours, according to a news release from Phoenix-based Mesa.
In addition, Mesa will receive approximately $1.6 million in the form of deferred monthly fee payments under the component maintenance agreement.
Fokker Services is part of the Stork Aerospace group.
BANK RAISES STAKE IN GENERAL GROWTH
Morgan Stanley raised its stake in General Growth Properties Inc., the shopping mall owner that last month said it may file for bankruptcy protection.
The investment bank raised its stake to 5.1 percent from 3 percent in the Chicago-based mall operator that owns Ala Moana Center and Ward Centers. Including the latest purchase Morgan Stanley now owns 13.6 million shares of General Growth.
The investment by Morgan Stanley follows last week's announcement that William Ackman's Pershing Square Capital Management LP, a hedge-fund manager, bought a 20 percent interest in General Growth through shares and swaps.
General Growth last month hired law firm Sidley Austin as it seeks to refinance debt and, in a Nov. 10 regulatory filing, said its "potential inability to address our 2008 or 2009 debt maturities in a satisfactory fashion raises substantial doubts as to our ability to continue as a going concern."
General Growth said at the time it may have to seek legal protection from creditors. It has since received a two-week extension on mortgages totaling $900 million that matured Nov. 28, and yesterday said it received an extension until Dec. 11 on $58 million of debt that matured yesterday.
ISLES' BROADBAND IS 2ND SLOWEST
The average speed of an Internet broadband connection in Hawai'i was ranked second slowest in the nation by www.PCmag.com.
The average speed of 378 kilobits per second for a Hawai'i broadband connection was second only to New Mexico at 322 Kbps, according to the report issued yesterday.
Nevada topped the list with an average speed of 781 Kbps, while the national average was 557 Kbps.
www.PCMag.com said it tested the speeds using a custom-designed SurfSpeed application that grabs pages from several popular Web sites to measure actual Internet surfing speed.
