Each one in plain English, with the numbers worked through for a shareholder.
15 Mar 2016debt financing▼ BadMajor
The crisis widened into a broad default wave: Energy XXI Gulf Coast missed interest on both its 6.875% notes and 11.000% second lien notes, and EPL again missed interest on its 8.25% notes, with lenders granting only a one-month waiver while slashing the revolving facility's borrowing base from $500 million to $377.7 million - effectively eliminating any remaining borrowing capacity beyond existing letters of credit.
Subsidiary EPL Oil & Gas missed the February 15, 2016 interest payment on its 8.25% notes - Energy XXI's first actual payment default - and lenders granted only a brief waiver through mid-March, meanwhile barring new borrowings under the credit facility and requiring loan proceeds to be swept into a lender-controlled account.
Nasdaq warned Energy XXI (EXXI) that its stock had traded below the $1.00 minimum bid price for 30 straight days, starting a 180-day clock to regain compliance by August 2016.
With EBITDA collapsing alongside oil prices, Energy XXI's lenders dramatically loosened the secured-debt leverage covenant - allowing it to rise from a suspended level to 3.75x, then to 4.75x by March 2016 and as high as 5.25x by mid-2016 - rather than the company actually deleveraging, while holding the borrowing base flat at $500 million.
Energy XXI disclosed it would restate four years of annual financials (FY2011-FY2014) and multiple quarters after finding its hedge-accounting documentation didn't meet the technical requirements for cash-flow-hedge treatment, forcing derivative gains and losses to be reclassified from other comprehensive income into earnings. The company said the restatement was a non-cash, presentation-only issue with no effect on liquidity, EBITDA or debt covenants - but it was still a multi-year accounting control failure surfacing just as the company's finances were under real strain.
The Grand Isle Gathering System sale-leaseback closed for $245 million, locking Energy XXI into a new fixed obligation averaging $40.5 million a year in lease payments over the 11-year term - a real ongoing cash drain layered onto an already strained balance sheet just as oil prices kept falling.
Under mounting cash pressure, Energy XXI agreed to sell its Grand Isle Gathering System - Gulf of Mexico shelf pipeline and onshore processing infrastructure - to CorEnergy Infrastructure Trust subsidiary Grand Isle Corridor for $245 million plus assumption of a $12.5 million abandonment liability, immediately leasing it back for 11 years so operations continue uninterrupted - a sale-leaseback raising cash by monetizing core infrastructure rather than new financing.
Energy XXI filed its Gulf Coast subsidiary's routine Q3 FY2015 financial statements, with total outstanding notes now spanning five series worth $3.6 billion face value.
Energy XXI closed the $1.45 billion second-lien notes offering, netting about $1.35 billion at a steep discount - expensive but critical financing used to term out the revolving facility that was otherwise facing shrinking borrowing-base capacity.
Energy XXI priced $1.45 billion of new 11.000% senior secured second lien notes at a 12.000% yield to maturity - by far its most expensive financing yet, a stark jump from the 6.875% it paid just ten months earlier, underscoring how quickly its cost of capital had deteriorated as oil prices fell.
Energy XXI's lenders sharply tightened the credit agreement: dividends to the parent were cut off (with a narrow carve-out to distribute the Grand Isle gathering system), asset-sale proceeds now required lender consent and had to be held in pledged accounts, and - most strikingly - the facility itself was set to shrink from roughly $1.5 billion to just $500 million once further conditions were met, with a new intercompany loan mechanism to funnel cash to EPL. Barely nine months after the EPL deal pushed borrowing capacity to its all-time peak, the credit facility was already being unwound.
With oil prices sliding, Energy XXI's board named director James LaChance interim Chief Strategic Officer specifically to negotiate with lenders and noteholders on alternative financing to fix the company's leverage and debt maturities - paying him $200,000/month plus a success fee of up to $6 million if he landed a financing deal, an unmistakable sign the board saw a real refinancing crisis ahead.
Hayman Capital Management, L.P, Hayman Investments, L.L.C, J. Kyle Bass reported no remaining Energy XXI Ltd shareholding in its periodic institutional filing.