Report: Would Mays & McCombs Rescue iHM?

San Antonio billionaire investor B.J. “Red” McCombs picked up the phone and called his friend and former business partner L. Lowry Mays a few months ago.

McCombs (News-Express foto)

The friendship is decades old. Mays, with McCombs as a partner and close adviser, had built up Clear Channel Communications into the world’s largest radio and billboard company from the early 1970s until it was sold in 2008.

According to David Hendricks at the San Antonio News-Express, their recent telephone conversation, though, focused on the news that the company, with different owners and now called iHeartMedia Inc., was conducting pre-bankruptcy talks with lenders and bondholders after declaring that the company by February may not be able to meet some of its maturing $20.4 billion in debt.

The company’s daunting repayment schedule, stemming from the 2008 leverage buyout by two Boston-based private equity firms, makes iHeartMedia one of the country’s largest corporate debt dilemmas.

Mays (undated AP foto)

In his rather lengthy story Hendricks reports the 82-year-old Mays said McCombs surprisingly suggested that they buy back the company, which owns about 850 radio stations across the U.S.

McCombs, 89, said he put it this way: “If it ends up in a refinancing mode, I told him (Mays) that I would have some interest in it. (Mays) said, ‘Count me in.’”

But the one conversation is as far as it has gone for now, Mays and McCombs said.

Mays also said any future involvement in the company “depends” on where values go “if the company goes into a restructuring.”

But as Mays and McCombs watch, San Antonio-based radio and billboard giant iHeartMedia inches toward bankruptcy, a step expected by credit-rating agencies and corporate debt analysts alike. The eventuality would mark another new direction in the company’s already twisted 44-year existence.

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