Assets

The rapidly expanding Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc., based in Baltimore, has bought the assets of an Alabama television station for an undisclosed price, the company announced yesterday.Sinclair, which owns Baltimore's Channel 45, has purchased the building and other assets of WDBB-TV in Tuscaloosa, Ala., said David D. Smith, Sinclair's president.The Baltimore-based broadcast group also has entered into a management agreement to operate the license of WDBB-TV, which is currently affiliated with Fox Broadcasting.

Broadening the inquiry into Enron's collapse, federal investigators who have been examining the esoteric details of off-the-books partnership schemes are now looking at such basics as whether the company misled investors about the value of hard assets like pipelines and power plants, according to people involved in the case. The new line of inquiry represents a focus on the sort of run-of-the-mill accounting issues that have been raised in numerous corporate fraud cases in the past. Under examination, these people said, is whether Enron carried assets on its books for billions of dollars more than their actual worth.

One casualty of the bust in Nasdaq stocks was the idea of intangible business assets. Amid bitter investor skepticism, such squishy items as research and development, software, employee training and brand power no longer stood any chance of being counted as real assets on corporate balance sheets, alongside such traditional assets as factories and equipment. With stock prices plunging starting in 2000, and companies cooking their books, it's not surprising that investors were asking, "Where's the beef?"

NEW YORK - Creditors of Enron Corp., which filed the second-largest U.S. bankruptcy, stand to recover up to $5 billion in assets that may have been illegally moved off the company's books, according to a government-appointed examiner's report. "Enron so engineered its reported financial position and results of operations that its financial statements bore little resemblance to its actual financial condition or performance," R. Neal Batson, an Atlanta attorney hired by the U.S. Justice Department to investigate the company on behalf of the judge in charge of the bankruptcy proceeding, said yesterday.

Biosys Inc., the Columbia bio-pesticides company, said yesterday that it will seek U.S. Bankruptcy Court approval Tuesday for its plan to sell most of its assets to Thermo Trilogy Corp., another Columbia bio-pesticides firm.Biosys, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in September, said in a statement that it estimates the value of the Thermo Trilogy deal at $15 million to $21 million.In its bankruptcy filing, which resulted from a severe cash shortage, Biosys listed assets of $24.1 million as of June 30, 1996.

A former shareholder of Crown Central Petroleum Corp. filed a class action lawsuit yesterday accusing company officials, including Chairman Henry A. Rosenberg Jr., of misrepresenting the value of Crown's assets and its financial outlook in order to win a vote to buy out stockholders and take the refiner private. "This class action complaint arises out of a scheme by Crown's controlling shareholders to appropriate for themselves Crown's assets at a fraction of their value," charges the suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia by former shareholder James J. Hayes of Annandale, Va. The plaintiffs are seeking at least $100 million.

Attorneys for a Columbia banker accused of killing his two preschool-age daughters and for his estranged wife agreed yesterday to freeze the couple's assets and to delay proceedings in their divorce case temporarily. The agreement between lawyers for Robert Emmett Filippi and Naoko Nakajima also calls for the sale of the couple's Harmel Drive house, which is valued at $325,700 and is mortgaged. The proceeds, which will be placed in an escrow account, and other "marital assets" will be frozen until the two sides can agree on how to divide them, the lawyers said.

STAMFORD, Conn. - Xerox Corp. had its credit ratings on about $11 billion in debt cut to below-investment grade yesterday by Moody's Investors Service, a move that will heighten the cash crunch at the world's largest copier company. The company also announced 275 job cuts yesterday. The firings follow 350 administrative staff jobs cut last month. All of the recently announced job cuts are separate from the 5,200 layoffs that the company said in March would be carried out by April 2001.

Officials of Preston Trucking Co. Inc., the Eastern Shore-based company that unexpectedly ceased operations in July, provided answers for some of its nearly 10,000 creditors yesterday on the company's recent Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing.During a financial fact-finding hearing at the Office of the U.S. Trustee on Pratt Street, David Letke, Preston's president and chief executive, said company officials realized during the week of July 26 that they had no option but to file for bankruptcy when they determined that the company did not have enough cash to cover its $6 million payroll.

First Mariner Bancorp said yesterday that net income rose six-fold to $151,342 in the first quarter, and assets, loans and deposits grew at a double-digit pace.The banking company earned 5 cents a share in the first quarter that ended March 31, compared with $24,076, or 1 cent a share, for the same period in 1997.First Mariner's earnings, however, fell short of analyst Collyn Bement's expectations by 2 cents a share."Everything still looks good," said Bement, who follows the company for Ferris, Baker Watts Inc. in Baltimore.