A £1.1bn ($1.78bn) financial loss; 31,000 elderly residents left dangling; 44,000 staff fearful for their jobs; the highly leveraged private equity partly fingered as the culprit. UK care home operator Southern Cross is being portrayed as the private equity industry at its worst.
According to a July story in the UK's Daily Mail, “by the time they [private equity] sold out in 2007, they had taken hundreds of millions out of the company, stripped its property assets, and saddled it with crippling long-term rental obligations”.
