Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming January 2015 32 Apollo is known for playing its own brand of hard ball, and lenders who help Apollo finance corporate takeovers have begun asking for extra returns on their money—an “Apollo premium,” they call it—because of the likelihood the deals will result in costly litigation. Feature “In situations where credit-default swaps play a meaningful part of the case, you don’t realize the strange impact they have on the process,” said David Kurtz, global head of restructuring at Lazard, speaking at a recent debt conference in New York. “What you find is that you don’t really know the motivation of the holder of the debt.” But then Apollo is known for playing its own brand of hard ball, and it appears there is no love lost between the two firms. As Bloomberg described it in its Christmas Eve coverage, citing anonymous sources, “So great was the ill will between them that when Apollo held a pivotal negotiating session at its office in Manhattan, it didn’t invite Elliott.” “We will aggressively go out and protect our investments using all the tools available to us to be able to do so,” a partner in Apollo’s buyout unit said. Bloomberg says it’s why lenders that help Apollo finance corporate takeovers have begun asking for extra returns on their money—an “Apollo premium,” they call it—because of the likelihood the deals will result in costly litigation. “This is how they operate,” a senior executive with AllianceBernstein, a New York-based asset management firm, told the news agency. Most buyout houses “don’t want to be perceived as having an adversarial relationship with bondholders,” he said. “Whereas with Apollo, that’s kind of their modus operandi.”