Interesting link…
“There’s no one in my family—there’s the Katz family, the Wilpon family, kids—[that now] has any personal bank debt. Zero. Everything has been paid. We don’t owe a dollar to anybody. We have mortgages on buildings and stuff like that, but we don’t owe a dollar.”
Of course the debt that has been crippling the Mets for years now isn’t personal family debt, but the $320 million against the team due in 2014, and the $700 million against Wilpon and his partners’ 65 percent stake in S.N.Y. That is due in 2015, and is significantly larger now, thanks to the additional loan against that holding taken out in December.
via Either Fred Wilpon’s filings are lying about his debts or he is | Capital New York.
Well, obviously Wilpon was addressing personal debt and not business debt. This comment or statement from Wilpon came in conjunction with the trustee in the Madoff case announcing the second round of money he had collected and the anticipated disbursements as they currently stand. So how does this make Wilpon a liar? Listen, I would love to go back to the days of Nelson Doubleday running the team when things were run the right way. I think that just like any new business owner the Wilpon’s have had to find their way to a positive working model for the Mets. Fred Wilpon was only saying that the Mets will be back to spending on free agents next year. No lies here. I wish people would separate their antipathy towards the Wilpons with good reporting. Of course, good journalism died a long time ago but I just wish that only bash the Mets would just crawl back under their collective rocks.
Mark,
You probably ought to read what Wilpon actually said. He said he and his family are free of personal debt. Leaving aside the relevance of that (business debt has been the culprit), a quick search of UCC filings reveals even this version of events is not true.
Pretty simple.