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Originally Posted by Winsor_Pilates
How much did they buy the team for?
I'm hearing $550 Million is expected sale price now; curious how much that's up.
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I'm not sure about Burkle, but Mario got his piece in lieu of money owed to him by the previous owner.
From the Penguins' Wikipedia page...
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The Penguins were simultaneously in the midst of a battle for their survival. Their free-spending ways in the early 1990s came with a price; at one point they owed over $90 million to various creditors. Owners Howard Baldwin and Morris Belzberg (who bought the Penguins after their first Cup win) asked the players to defer their salaries to help pay the bills. When the deferred salaries finally came due, combined with other financial pressures, the Penguins were forced to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in November 1998.
At this point, Lemieux stepped in with an unusual proposal to buy the team out of bankruptcy. By this time, the Penguins owed him $32.5 million in deferred salary, making him the team's largest creditor. He proposed to convert enough of this money into equity to give him controlling interest. He also promised to keep the team in Pittsburgh. The League and the court agreed, and Lemieux, with help from supermarket tycoon Ronald Burkle, assumed control on September 3, 1999, thus saving the franchise for the second time.
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I don't know what percentage of the team Mario owns, but if they can sell for over a half a billion, it's safe to say he did well for that $32.5 million.