Trumps casino company failed to find a buyer | IXGAMES

Trump Entertainment Resorts Inc., the casino company founded by real estate developer Donald Trump, failed to find a buyer after a three-month search, sending its shares to the biggest drop in two years. The offers the company received weren’t likely to lead to a transaction, Trump said yesterday in a statement. Trump hired Merrill Lynch & Co. in March to explore a sale. It held negotiations with a group of investors that included Dennis Gomes, the former manager of the Trump Taj Mahal. Trump, whose television program “The Apprentice” professed to show how a business should run, has struggled to make money for investors in his casinos. Three of his properties went bankrupt in the early 1990s. He led the company through nine years of losses and six months of bankruptcy before relinquishing the chief executive post in 2005. “The assets are old and tired, and that’s the problem,” said Justin Sebastiano, an analyst at San Francisco-based Nollenberger Capital Partners. As competitors upgrade, “it’s only going to get tougher for the rest of the year and into ’08,” he said. Last year, Trump Entertainment tried to enter the Philadelphia casino market, then dropped the plans after losing a bid to secure a Pennsylvania license. The shares yesterday fell $2.09, or 16.6 percent, to $10.49, in Nasdaq composite index trading, their lowest since May 2005. The company is valued at $326 million on the stock market. “We have a good company and we’re going to run the company,” Donald Trump, who remains the Atlantic City, N.J.-based company’s chairman, said in an interview. Trump controls 29 percent of the company’s shares. In addition to his casino company, Trump has developed apartments and hotels in New York and invested in projects in cities including Las Vegas, Chicago and Miami. He also has buildings in Scotland, Dubai and the Dominican Republic. Trump Entertainment will now be run by Mark Juliano, who has taken over as acting chief executive after James Perry left the company. The company said yesterday that it fired Paul Keller, its head of design and construction, and chief information officer Virginia McDowell. Options for the company may include refinancing its $1.4billion in long-term debt, selling one or more of its casinos or licensing the Trump name to other companies, Adam Steinberg, an analyst at Morgan Joseph & Co., said yesterday in a note to investors. Trump, who entered Atlantic City with the Trump Plaza in 1984, took the Trump Taj Mahal into bankruptcy protection in 1991, then did the same with the Plaza and Trump Castle, now called Trump Marina, in 1992. Six years later, he tried without success to find a buyer for the casinos.