Or at least that is what this appears to mean:
From Atrios
If I understand this correctly, Sam Zell basically bought his newspaper empire by pretending the employees were actually the owners and then borrowing lots of money in their name, paying it back by deducting from payroll.
One of the trickiest issues will be how to handle a financing scheme Zell used to buy Tribune that relied on a tax-exempt employee stock ownership plan, known as an ESOP. Although employees had no say over how the ESOP was used, Tribune's board approved Zell's bid, which used the ESOP as a vehicle through which he borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars to tax-efficiently fund the transaction. The scheme allowed Zell to pony up just $315 million of his own cash to wrest control of the company and made employees technically Tribune's owners.
But ownership came at a price: Tribune cut back its 401(k) contributions and instead committed to use a portion of its payroll to pay down the hundreds of millions in debt that a trust set up for the ESOP used to buy Tribune shares, according to employee stock owner plan expert Corey Rosen. "It was like a mortgage that you use to buy a house with no money down," says Rosen, who wrote a report that goes into detail on Tribune's ESOP arrangements.
the BusinessWeek article goes on to say:
Now, the ESOP's equity stakes will likely be wiped out, and the handling of the tax gains will likely become an issue in the bankruptcy restructuring. "If a company goes bankrupt, the equity runs the risk of not being worth much," says Standard & Poor's analyst Emile Courtney. "They will probably lose everything" in the ESOP, predicts tax expert Robert Willens, who has closely studied the Tribune deal.
And Zell still owns the Cubs.
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