JCPenney expected to sell to Simon and Brookfield for $1.75B
PLANO, Texas -- Next time you visit a JCPenney store, it won't just be in the mall, it could be owned by the mall.
The 118-year-old department store is expected to enter into a $1.75 billion sale agreement with commercial real estate companies Simon Property Group and Brookfield Property Partners.
JCPenney has been struggling for years and hasn't had a profitable year since 2010.
The sale is expected to move Texas-based JCPenney out of bankruptcy and prevent liquidation of its assets, according to news announced in a Sept. 9 hearing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas.
"Simon, Brookfield, the lenders, and the company, the creditors committee are all committed to moving this forward quickly and saving JCPenney as we know it," Joshua Sussberg of Kirkland and Ellis law firm, who is representing JCPenney in this process, told Community Impact Newspaper.
He said details behind the sale are concrete but not official.
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"[There] is a nonbinding but fully executed letter of intent," he told the judge. "And it comes together with significant documentation and the guts of an overall transaction, all of which will be documented in the near term."
This sale is expected to save about 70,000 jobs, according to Sussberg.
JCPenney says it expects the sale to be final before the 2020 holiday season.
At the time of the bankruptcy filing in May, JCPenney had 850 department stores in the United States and Puerto Rico.
