Posts Tagged ‘Chicago Cubs’

Mark Cuban, the internet billionaire who owns the Dallas Mavericks and numerous film and TV entities, is facing insider trading charges with one of his internet search engines Mamma.com, according to AOL’s news.

Cuban apparently either bought or sold 600,000 shares of Mamma.com, which piqued the Securities and Exchange Commission’s never-ending interest.

The last celebrity gazillionaire to face such charges was Martha Stewart, who had to do a small stint in the hoosgow before settling back into an unwatched good housekeeping TV show.

Cuban had been rumored to be considering buying the Chicago Cubs. Maybe the Cubs first-round playoff destruction at the hands of the Los Angeles Dodgers made him run home to Mamma.

Sam Zell has a few hurdles to clear before he can buy the Tribune Co., even though shareholders are set to vote on his $8.2 billion proposal in late August.

According to the LAT:

Washington regulators must agree to transfer the licenses of Tribune’s 23 TV stations and one radio station to the new company, led by real estate mogul Sam Zell, and to issue waivers allowing it to hold on to TV stations in Los Angeles and four other cities where Tribune also owns newspapers, including The Times.

In addition, borrowing terms have grown more onerous since Zell made the proposal in April, making it costlier to finance the transaction. The company is expected to be saddled with about $10 billion in debt even after an expected sale of the Chicago Cubs baseball team.

Wall Street has signaled its skittishness, sending Tribune shares down to $29.25 late last month after they had hit a high in late May of $33.20. The Zell deal is worth $34 a share if it is completed.

Meanwhile, conventional wisdom around the LAT newsroom (with the people we’ve spoken to, anyway) is that once Zell does get his hands on Trib, he’s likely to sell off the L.A. paper to David Geffen. We’ll see if that scuttlebutt turns out to be anything close to true.

People Having More Fun Than You: If your New Year’s Eve was spent wrapped in a blanket and sniffling into a bowl of chicken soup, don’t read about how the Flaming Lips New Year’s Eve show was the best party on Earth or how the Killers killed.

And Cars Will Fly, And Robots Will Do Our Homework: We don’t like to make media predictions, but we’ll make an exception here. Our prediction for 2007 is that the LAT predictions for 2007 look silly by 2008.

To wit:

Tribune Co. is bought by the Los Angeles newspaper dynasty (the Chandlers) that is its largest shareholder, which is intent on avoiding a huge tax bill had the company — owner of the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Cubs, KTLA-TV Channel 5 and many other properties — been sold off piecemeal.

Maybe ‘Dirt’ Should Hire Her: Leave it to Robin Abcarian to make even the least interesting-sounding TV show in the lineup sound like something worth watching. Well, some of us think so, anyway.